dressed. premiered at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim, winning a Scotsman Fringe First as well as a nomination for ThisEgg for Total Theatre Awards’ Emerging Company 2018.
The intimate show created by four school friends is to tour the UK, using storytelling, live sewing, music, dance and clowning to turn a traumatic experience into something beautiful and resilient; a show about reclaiming one’s body, female friendship and the integrity of clothes to identity.
After being stripped at gunpoint, Lydia Higginson sought to redress herself by creating her entire wardrobe from scratch.
In 2016, Lydia, a seamstress and costume designer, gave herself a year to make all her own clothes, after which she gave away all those she had ever bought. Friends since school, Josie, a theatre maker, Nobahar, a singer, Olivia, a dancer, and Lydia, took this act of reclamation and self-liberation as the basis of their show to celebrate the power clothes have to define, liberate, hide and embellish.
Josie Dale-Jones says, “We started making dressed. in July 2017. In November 2017, the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke out. This changed both everything, and nothing; in the way we made the show, in what we were exploring, and in how we saw ourselves as women in the world. When #MeToo gained momentum though, it did feel like a rally cry, a howl back to keep going; amongst the wider movement for change, there was a need to hold on to personal journeys, for individual voices to be heard”. Lydia Higginson adds, “When you devise theatre, you are trying to create a world that the audience can believe in. For the last decade, the three women I created dressed. with have been rebuilding my world into a place I can believe in. Last year we decided to create dressed. for women whose worlds have been shattered, and for all the friends who have helped rebuild them.”
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Trigger warning: This show explores themes of rape and sexual assault which some audience members may find distressing.
