Calm Down Dear – Camden People’s Theatre’s flagship festival of feminist performance celebrates its milestone birthday with the mighty multi Fringe First winning RashDash curating a dynamic and boundary-pushing series of shows from some of the UK’s most exciting performance-makers.
Sluts with Consoles (Saturday 3 June), from Dogmouth Theatre, tackles the truth about the unshakeable stereotypes projected onto women in the gaming industry. This anarchic, dark comedy is part love-letter to the games we grew up with and part coming-of-age temper tantrum from the UNTAPPED Award-nominated early-career company.
Autobiographical stories from Maedb Joy’s Home Sweet Hell (Tuesday 6 June) and Elina Alminas’ Pleasure Little Treasure (Saturday 10 June) explore modern sex work in the face of poverty and growing up in the very first post-Soviet strip club in Estonia respectively. Expect raw musings on the damage of toxic masculinity and the male gaze and navigating life where sex work provides an unlikely safety net for many. Whilst the need to bring female pleasure to the fore is the crux of my gentle wild squirts (Thursday 1 June) from Brazilian performance artist Helena Araújo. Inspired by the idea of radical softness and the empowerment of owning your sexuality, the piece inhabits the spaces between dance, theatre, performance and poetry to bring a transformative, interdisciplinary, radical show to the CPT stage.
STABLE (Friday 2 June) uncovers domestic abuse in a world of horse dealing, dark humour and uncontrollable laughter whilst questioning what sort of adult you become after witnessing domestic abuse as a child. Now a mother to two small children, STABLE marks the autobiographical debut work of Sheffield writer-performer Beth Crackles. Parent-child relationships are also explored in Storm (Wednesday 14 June) which revels in the chaos and conflict of single-parent families and highlights the underrepresented voices of neurodiverse women and those experiencing menopause. Co-directed by Sam Hardie (The PappyShow), Storm charts Juliet Knight’s (National Youth Theatre’s Zigger Zagger, Prime Resident, White Boy) own experience of parenting a baby in a special care unit and the impact of early mother-daughter separation.
Fresh from Melbourne Comedy Festival, Laurie Black brings Dystopiano (Wednesday 7 June) to CPT. Transporting you to a new dystopia through her unique blend of synth rock and satire, Black’s work straddles comedy and cabaret and has been previously seen on festival line-ups with La Clique, Briefs Factory: Sweatshop and on tour with the legendary Adam Ant. Also from recent comedy festival success comes Posey Mehta with her new show Babycakes (Wednesday 31 May). Following I Am Not a Gorilla (in the top 25 best-reviewed shows at Edinburgh Fringe 2022), Mehta’s next piece is a supremely silly character comedy which focuses on how fat bodies move and are perceived.
Cry for me (Saturday 17 June) delves deep into Romanian culture, contextualising the folk figure of the babă through the act of crying as a social duty and form of resilience. Explored through clowning, cabaret and live ambulatory art, Cry for me is an exciting partnership between Romanian actor and theatre-maker Andreea Tudose (Assistant Producer for Odd Eyes Theatre, On The Line) and iulia isar, a Romanian theatremaker and youth worker who recently worked with distinctive political theatre company BÉZNĂ Theatre on How to Break Out of a Detention Centre.
You can also catch early glimpses of thoughtful feminist work at CPT’s two Calm Down, Dear Big Bang Scratch Nights (Monday 5 June and Sunday 11 June). Each evening plays host to several artists testing a whirlwind of ideas and forms in front of a live audience.
Artistic Director of CPT, Brian Logan, said: “It’s such a privilege to have worked with the great RashDash to present this year’s festival of innovative feminist performance, ‘Calm Down, Dear’. Theatre heroes of mine, their work is characterised by integrity, intelligence and brio – and it’s feminist to the hilt. In the guest-curator role, they’ve brought all the enthusiasm, commitment and principle we could have dared to expect. It’s a privilege too to launch the tenth edition of this extraordinary event, and by doing so, to mark ten tumultuous years of feminist thought, feminist action, and feminist theatre-making. We hope this year’s festival, jam-packed with bold young artists, will offer perspective on that journey, and on where the fights against sexism and for gender equality find themselves in 2023. We can promise you three weeks of performance that have been lovingly assembled and absolutely teeming with thrills, laughs, new ideas and righteous zeal for social justice.”
Curators of the tenth anniversary edition of Calm Down, Dear, RashDash, said: ““Having never been on the reading end of an application process, this has been fascinating. There are so many people with awesome and inspiring ideas and we got some much from reading ALL the applications. We think / hope the festival we have landed on has a multifarious mix of artists exploring ideas, activism and form in wild, playful and thoughtful ways. There is personal and political, head, heart, body, fury, freedom and joy in here and we’re so happy to be a part of the 10th year of this festival.”
