Come June, the Junction in Cambridge will be hosting a weekend theatre festival unlike any that’s come before: Night Watch will condense an entire festival’s worth of new performance, theatre and live events into one 24-hour non-stop festival running right through the night from 12 noon Saturday 14 June to 12 noon Sunday 15. The Junction is known for keeping things fresh and unusual, and the mysterious late night hours of this festival are certainly unlikely to be any exception to this. If you think you’re up to the challenge of staying up the whole night – well done. If not – bring a sleeping bag and enjoy a rejuvenating kip on the mattresses provided.

This is the first year of Night Watch and the unique weekend picks up where Junction’s annual SAMPLED leaves off. Festival programmer Daniel Pitt has been involved right from the beginning. “This year we thought – what can we do differently?” he explains. “We conceived Night Watch with the premise of it being a 24-hour non-stop festival where you can come and stay for the whole weekend… doing it overnight obviously comes with its own challenges. Basically we’ve got three main spaces – a studio, a theatre and a gig venue. We’re turning our gig space into a sort of large tented communal crash space – so there’s going to be loads of mattresses all over the floor, people can check in their bags and valuables and go in and have a nap for a bit.” With food and drinks – and sleeping area – provided, the audience members need not leave the festival site for the whole weekend, becoming totally immersed in their own alternative, creative world. The whole idea of an overnight festival in somewhat inspired by the success of music festivals – or even night clubs – which capture the essence of a single experience, rather than a series of unconnected shows. Pitt wants this to be an event in and of itself, one with its own atmosphere – its own hum and buzz.

There’s a lot of variety throughout the festival – from Jo Bannon’s intimate ten minute one-to-one piece Exposure to comedic monologues to dance to 24-hour live art to installation works, so there’ll always be something happening for audiences to drop in and out of. The night-time setting has played an important part in the programming of the festival; Pitt and his team have carefully picked and ordered the shows to suit the time of night, and how they think audiences will be feeling by then. “It’s been curated around the time of night”, Pitt says. “There’s sort of more upbeat accessible things in the daytime and then it moves into the post-watershed period. We’ve taken into account what people want to be doing at different times of the day… throughout the night we’re being a bit more subversive, a bit more risky. Come 2am we’ve got Ann Liv Young who’s going to be doing the most risky thing we’ve got.” That “risky thing” is a piece called Us from the controversial American performance artist, playing with the saccharine sweetness 60s and 70s light entertainment alongside co-artist Kevin Wratten.

Astute observers (or just football fans) will notice that the festival weekend coincides with the all-important opening match of the football world cup. In homage to the significance of that event, the festival will present two football themed performances – Richard Dedomenici and Kim Noble’s one-off, one-of-a-kind live art commentary on the opening England vs. Italy game, which will be streamed live to all festival audience members who care to watch it, and Ahil Ratnamohan’s SDS1, a solo dance performance (with a football) exploring the art of the game and the experiences of its players. “Some people might call it dance and some people might disagree with that,” muses Ratnamohan as he gives his thoughts on his contribution to the festival. “In this particular piece, I’m trying to look at the psychological journey of a football player through a match and this idea of striving to be worshiped and be like a ‘football god’, but the more mundane and sometimes even the slaughter of actually going through that football match, the robotic-ness of it, the efficiency that you’re required to have. We have this idea of playing football – the ‘beautiful game’ cliché that is branded about, but the truth is when you’re playing a match how often do you get to actually engage with that football game. I’m trying to look at the reality of being in that game… as a player.”

Another intriguing piece worth a mention is Christopher Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die, a work he describes as “a one man show halfway between performance art and stand-up-y storytelling… the whole thing is concerning our obsession with the apocalypse, our fixation on death and how that might just be a sort of moral get-out clause for taking responsibility for our actions in the present tense. But that all sounds a little preachy – it’s actually hopefully very, very funny.” The show is Bailey’s first solo piece and came to life after he, suffering from writer’s block, decided to write down every single creative idea he had, no matter how small, foolish or unstageable. This show is a sort of cut of all of that material – capped off with a musical finale.

With its excitingly bold premise and the eclectic blend of the clever, witty, experimental or just plain bizarre in its line-up, who knows what will happen over the 24 hours of the first ever Night Watch festival. But whatever does happen, it certainly won’t be boring.

Night Watch takes place at Junction Theatre, Cambridge from 13-14 June. Further information and to book tickets via the Junction Theatre website.