Following a hugely successful second year in 2012, which saw more than 50,000 people attend, the Imagine Watford Festival will once again be bringing free top performance acts to the streets, venues and waterways of Watford. For two weeks, Watford will be transformed from an ordinary town, with shops and businesses, into a place of live theatre, dance, music, acrobatic acts and art.

Here are two locally-based acts which will thrill and amaze.

TUG
A unique interactive dance performance, TUG, will float along the Grand Union’s historic canal on a specially adapted heritage workboat that has been transformed into a surreal contemporary showboat manned by a clown, a ballerina, a hidden madrigal and a shamanic storyteller.
Henrietta Hale, co-director of the performance and a member of the Dog Kennel Hill Project, a performance company based in Rickmansworth, tries to explain.
“It’s not a narrative, it’s more of a dreamscape with lots of different images and texts.
“It’s a meditation on ‘then and now’ of the canals, how things change, how people see the past, often through rose-tinted glasses, and what things meant to us then and what they mean to us now.“
Six audience members will be invited onto the workboat and a larger group will follow the boat along the towpath, accompanied by an audio-guide and local volunteers in costume performing and re-enacting historical situations.
“It’s totally unique,“ Henrietta continues. “It’s a very surreal experience that you can indulge in and feel like you’ve really gone on a journey into your imagination.“
TUG is at Lady Capel’s Bridge, Grand Union Canal on June 26, 29 and 30 at various times.

Our Sound
The community of Watford has come together to create a new piece of work especially for Imagine Watford with Watford Palace Theatre – Our Sound, the music for which is performed by an ensemble of the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Storyteller Craig Jenkins ran a series of community narrative workshops with schools, groups for the elderly, volunteering groups at the Palace.
“I asked the groups which ideas they’d like to see represented,“ Craig explains, “characters, themes, issues, genres, then I took their ideas away and put them together into a story.“
Craig produced the story of Amal, a little boy who lives in a town where the people don’t speak to each other and are all wary of each other because they have different sounds. Amal’s only friend is a clockwork tiger that he has to wind up every day.
When the bad feelings of the residents build up to a destructive pich, Amal has to get the townspeople to come together to heal them all.
“One of the things that came from the group workshops was the idea that stories and music can bring people together.“
Our Sound is at Watford Palace Theatre, Clarendon Road on June 29 at 6pm. Details: imaginewatford.co.uk