Episode 1 :: Sh!t Theatre Stage Left

FK Alexander and I met in 2018 to discuss her recent show VIOLENCE and (I Could Go on Singing) Over the Rainbow, a 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe breakout hit. FK is a Glasgow-based live artist whose shows are often durational, ritualistic, and experiential for audiences, foregrounding violent actions and noise but rooted in tender intimacy. Confronting big and often difficult feelings, not least loneliness, their effects are destructive but also restorative. They are consistently fascinated with pop cultural fantasy figures, such as ‘girl next door’ Judy Garland, and Queen of Hearts, Princess Diana. We discuss FK’s devising practices, motivations, and obsessions, and how order and sobriety in day-to-day life allow her to dig deep into violence in performance.

Krishna Istha and I discuss their stand-up comedy show about trans experience, Beast, directed by Zoë Coombs Marr. Krishna is a London-based performer, writer, live artist, and theatre maker whose work explores gender politics and queer culture. They created performance persona Bambi Sexsmith during Duckie’s Homosexualist Summer School, trained with GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN and comedian Hannah Gadsby, and performed in Rosana Cade’s Walking:Holding, Laura Bridgeman’s The Butch Monologues, and Wild Bore by Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, and Adrienne Truscott. Krishna and I discuss Beast’s infusion of comedy with live art; its costuming, audiences, scenography, and making process; and topics from racism to QTIPOC cabaret, mentoring, visibility, and touring while trans.

Breach Theatre co-directors Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett met me to discuss It’s True, It’s True, It’s True. The show restages the seventeenth-century trial of artist Agostino Tassi for the rape of teenage Artemisia Gentileschi, who would become one of the most famous painters of her era. Combining courtroom drama, stagings of some of Gentileschi’s most famous – and feminist – paintings, punk music, and a powerful three-woman ensemble, It’s True, It’s True, It’s True confronts sexual, social, and institutional violence against women. Billy, Ellice, and I talk ‘post-verbatim’ theatre, devising, performing Artemisia, #MeToo, rage, care, design, structuring, and staging nakedness, sex, and violence. It’s True, It’s True, It’s True was an award-winning hit at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe and London’s New Diorama Theatre and returns to Edinburgh as part of the British Council’s 2019 Showcase before a UK tour. https://www.facebook.com/breachtheatre/

Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill joined me in April 2019 to discuss their collaboratively devised show MOOT MOOT, which appears in the 2019 Showcases of Made in Scotland and the British Council at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the absurd parallel universe of MOOT MOOT, Cade and MacAskill play doppelganger radio talk show hosts Barry and Barry, struggling to communicate meaningfully while nevertheless sustaining humour, playfulness, fondness, and the suggestions of queer love. We talk about what motivated the work, its relationship to an era of opinions, and its engagement with techniques of collaboration, physical theatre, costuming, improvisation, and characterization.

I met the Reverend Billy – also known as Bill Talen – at Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios in east London near the end of his Trump Depression Hotline Tour across England in October 2017. Based in New York since the 1990s, the Reverend Billy and his secular-political Church of Stop Shopping use public preaching and singing to protest against rampant consumerism, corporate greed, ecological injustice, and Trump. Reverend Billy and I discussed what’s important in using the arts to change the world, including local activism, collaboration, music, and love. The Trump Depression Hotline Tour is directed by Savitri D; the musical director is Nehemiah Luckett. www.revbilly.com