Out to Lunch Festival returns with a month of live events!
Out to Lunch – Belfast’s bespoke, boutique winter festival is back, very live and very loud, from 8-30 January 2022!
This marks the welcome and long awaited return of OTL “live”, with over 50 events taking place in our partner venue The Black Box, plus other spaces across Belfast.
The OTL22 festival programme is will be serving up a feast of music, comedy, theatre, film and spoken word – not to mention hundreds of hot lunches – and has been specially designed to delight audiences returning to the live experience, without compromising on safety and wellbeing.
Musical highlights from the 17th Out to Lunch programme include prince of the sound system DJ Norman Jay MBE, the ever brilliant Andy White, breath-taking piano virtuosity of Ruth McGinley, and the numble-fingered String Ninjas. We finally nail a date for the long awaited BC Camplight, and we are delighted to present the one, the only Blow Monkeys live in the Empire Music Hall. We welcome the return of a trio of Out to Lunch favourites Martin Stephenson (& The Daintees), Teddy Thompson and the mighty Dodge Brothers. With Bowie 75, we’ll be celebrating what would have been the great man’s birthday (presented by Joe Lindsay).
Seminal folk giants Fairport Convention and Out to Lunch favourite Hazel O’Connor also make welcome returns to the Black Box stage. The hotly tipped Amethyst Kiah will also be “Out to Lunch” this January, as will Roddy Woomble, Jane Weaver, Erland Cooper, Rory Nellis, Crowd Company, Mirenda Rosenberg, The Swing Gals, AJA – The Songs of Steely Dan, Ríoghnach Connolly, John Francis Flynn, Four Men and a Dog, Ciara O’Neill (launching her stunning new EP La Luna) and CQAF bursary award winners (and top dronesters) Junk Drawer, plus our first ever OTL artist in residence Myles McCormack to name but a generous fistful…
It’s a welcome back the green shoots of comedy to the Black Box with hilarious, hardy perennials Lucy Porter, Grace Petrie, Robin Ince, Paul Currie and twitter sensation Tadhg Hickey. The wonderful Holly McNish is back in the Black Box for Out to Lunch. Local literary brilliance comes in the shape of Moyra Donaldson, Nandi Joli and and we’re delighted to present Guy Masterson’s one-man Under Milk Wood, a genuine tour-de-force of the modern stage. And it’s fair to say that we’re in high dough over our Traditional Bread Baking Workshop.
The OTL Film Programme (supported by Film Hub) has an eclectic range of screenings from music documentary premiers to cult classic comedies. We’ll be showing Freak Scene: The Story of Dinosaur JR, The Nowhere Inn – the surreal new collaboration between St Vincent and Carrie Brownstein (of Sleater Kinney and Portlandia fame). There’s another opportunity to see the incredible Velvet Underground documentary by Todd Haynes, and we screen the elegiac documentary Road Runner – concerning the life of the late lamented Anthony Bourdain.
We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “Black Woodstock” in the incredible Wattstax documentary and there’s a rare screening for one of our (and Meryl Streep’s!) very favourite comedies, Waiting For Guffman.
Festival Director Sean Kelly said: “The 17th Out to Lunch Festival is a landmark festival for us and for Belfast. For one thing, Out to Lunch is back in venues where it belongs. And in the current social and political gloom, we hope we can offer good cheer, top entertainment and even a bowl of something hot for people throughout the longest, darkest month of what seems set to be an uncertain year. We’ll also be taking all the necessary safety precautions to ensure that our audiences can enjoy Out to Lunch with minimum fuss and maximum delight.”
Sonya Whitefield, Development Officer, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, added, “What a great start to the New Year with Out to Lunch Festival back live in venues for us all to enjoy! This festival is an annual highlight in the Belfast events calendar and this year’s programme is packed with exciting and interesting events. The festival also offers a valuable platform in supporting local artists and this year it’s great to classical Contemporary pianist, Ruth McGinley on the programme as well as singer songwriters, Brigid O’Neill, and Ciara O’Neill, who will be launching new music at the festival. Why not gift yourself or a loved one this Christmas with tickets to the festival, a fantastic way to support local.”
Tickets and info at www.cqaf.com
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