Reclaiming Physicality and Performance

 Posted by Astra

Before joining Lashings, I hadn't been on stage in five years. In the interim, my creativity had been channelled through a laptop in words and visuals. And a lot of it still is, and I love that. But performing on a stage again has given me back a mode of expression that I'd missed terribly -- using the whole of my body to tell a story.

For me, the best parts of any kind of creative process are the moments when it consumes me -- glancing at the clock and realising that hours have passed while I've been doing nothing but hammering out the next part of a story or storyboarding a video. With something like writing, that doesn't happen all the time, and that's okay. It's perfectly possible to get excellent work done without the lightning bolt of inspiration.

But the nature of performance is immersive. I don't know what other performers' experiences of their work are like, but for me, if I'm not wholly invested in the moment when I'm on stage, I'm not doing a good job. And there's something thrilling about that, the way that inhabiting a role or an act requires all of my mind and body.

I'm used to creativity being a mental activity, but performing with Lashings has brought the physical back, and it's wonderful. I have to think about my stance, my mannerisms, my voice and my facial expressions and use them all in combination to communicate to a live audience, a vastly different experience than sitting at a desk writing a story. It's terrifying and really quite exhilarating.

I'm used to the kinds of pursuits that require skills like talking and listening, not running and dancing. But acting requires me to find a physicality that I usually ignore. Here at the Fringe, as Fanny Whittington nears the end of its second week, every part of me from head to toe is involved in what I'm doing. Every night I am bounding onto stage and demanding that an audience looks at me, not just my face but my whole body. It's frightening, not just to accept but to demand that kind of attention, but it's rewarding too.

So many of us at Lashings are from groups who are constantly told that our physical appearance is not good enough, that it not does not conform enough to narrow standards set out by society at large. As members of marginalised and oppressed groups we are so often told that we should neither be seen nor heard. But all of us get up on stage and we charm and delight our audience and we are fantastic just as we are. It's a wonderful thing to be a part of. I get a huge amount from it, and I hope some of our audience does too.

In an hour I'm going to get into costume and breathe life into Ali Chapman for the penultimate time. I will sing, dance, laugh, shout and perform for an audience for an entire hour, just like I've been doing every night for two weeks, and I can't wait.

Damn, it's good to rip the label off.

Fanny Whittington is on tonight and tomorrow night, 20:15, Gryphon Venues, Bread Street, Edinburgh.

Fanny Whittington: why we need your help

Posted by Orlando and Galatea




Our editorial blog post is coming out a little early this week, but it’s for a very good reason: we need your help.

As you hopefully already know, we’re trying to raise the money to take our panto Fanny Whittington to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. To make this happen, we need you.

I [Orlando] am still a relatively new Lasher, but I’m a long-time fan. I first saw a Lashings show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010 - and I loved it so much I came back the next night. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen people talking on stage, in real life about things like consensual kink, heteronormativity, fat-shaming, and the stereotyping of queer women. It grabbed me by the gut and pulled me in. Lashings spoke to me in ways nothing else had. And I know for sure that I wasn’t the only one. At Lashings we get so much feedback saying how much what we do matters to you - how important it is for you to see people like you on stage, and remind you that you’re not alone. How important it is that we’re bringing our politics to people who haven’t thought about this stuff before, or haven’t been able to find the words for it. How important it is that we’re representing queer people, poly people, trans people, ace people, kinky people - and representing them as real and human, not just ciphers for an issue. Reading the reviews of our last pantomime still makes us a little teary-eyed.

Illustration by Marguerite; design by D. Gopal

And this time around, the show's concerns don't stop at sexuality and gender. By inverting the traditional story of 'Dick Whittington', by making our heroes the rats of London - the creatures that we're always told are dirty, dangerous and deviant - we've hit on some powerful ways of talking about what's going on in this country at the moment; about the ways in which some of us are scapegoated, exploited and blamed. The only problem we ran into while writing the show was that whenever we thought of something particularly egregious for the villainous Mayor to do, it usually turned out that the current government had already done it. Making jokes about anti-immigrant policies, bedroom taxes and DLA cuts is hard, but it's important too: as Max and Terry the pun-making, joke-cracking, 'Les-Mis'-filk singing rats point out to one another, if you don't laugh about this stuff, you just end up crying about it.

But to be able to keep doing this - we need your help. Everything that Sebastienne wrote last year is still true - more true than it ever was. Keeping Lashings going is really important, and keeping Lashings going is really hard. We’ve gone from being a tiny Oxford-based troupe doing shows in Oxford to an expanding collective with over 20 members, doing shows across the country. Almost every single show we do leaves us out of pocket, both as a collective and as individual members - charity gigs, student gigs, and academic gigs are never venues we make money. (Even with shows where the organisers are able to contribute to our travel expenses, we don’t turn a profit.) The two recent exceptions have been Lashings of Afternoon Tea Time in Oxford and Pirate Cabaret in London - both shows put together with the express aim of raising money for our Edinburgh run. This isn’t a complaint: we voluntarily do gigs in far-off cities for little-to-no expenses, because it’s important, and wonderful, and we love performing, and we love reaching new people. But also? It is hard, and draining, and it skews our shows towards being put together by those of us who can afford the time and money to travel all over.

Edinburgh is a different beast from all these shows. It’s somewhere where we can reach hundreds of new people - we can and do gain scores of fans, friends, and eventual collective members with every Edinburgh run. We rent a flat, and as many of us as possible spend a few weeks living in a blissful-yet-stressful queer-feminist bubble of singing and acting and flyering. The cost of Edinburgh is significantly higher than anything else we do, and it involves serious financial outlay. Currently, most of this is money that a few of us have been able to lend to the collective - there are Lashers who have put in several hundred pounds, such is their faith in the show. The only funding we have is us, and you.

We know times are hard, and money is tighter than ever with the government’s cuts that push marginalised people into further desperation. But now is the also the time that unapologetically angry, intersectional, feminist, queer, and left-wing voices need to be heard. We want to take vital political theatre to the Fringe this year. We want to skewer the austerity programme, make a show with real queer characters played by real queer people, and we want to make terrible puns while doing it. We hope you want us to do that too.

So - if Lashings' work has ever given you hope, or helped you feel less alone, or been there for you in whatever way - here is how you can be here for us: share this post, share the link to our IndieGogo, and donate if you can.

Trans*, queer, disabled: pick one (1) only

Posted by kaberett

CONTENT WARNINGS: cissexism, misogyny, suicide



... or that's what This Is Cabaret seem to think, anyway.

At least according to a review in which they misgender me and assume that my participation in a song about LGBT+ youth suicide... means that it's a song about sexuality and disability.

Well, let me just tell you, it gets better.

Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night....

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time



Tonight, our Edinburgh Fringe show - Alternative Sex Education - opens at the Bongo Club. This is the culmination of a lot of work for us - a chance to package up our politics, honed with sympathetic audiences and friendly bloggers, and take it to the general public. A quick plug, in case you, or anyone you know, are going to be in Edinburgh this month:

Alternative Sex Education

3-17 August, 8.30pm (1h)

The Bongo Club

(if you're a blogger, and fancy writing about us, please check out our press page at http://lashings.org/press/)

What Edinburgh means to me:

Galatea

I still can't believe that this is going to be my third Edinburgh with Lashings! Even though I'm only coming up for a little while this year, I'm so, so excited to be bringing the QUILTBAG joy to a whole new audience for another year. In celebration, I present to you, in no particular order, some of Galatea's favourite Memories of Edinburghs Past:

2010: 

• Sitting backstage at the late lamented underground Carlton Cabaret Bar, crushing ridiculously on the exquisitely beautiful and talented Rachael Sage and trying to find places in the overcrowded dressing room/cupboard to stash all the costume bits and ballet shoes.
• Late-night performance readings of very bad vampire fanfic conducted by Florestan and Lil!
• [TW: Fictional character death, suicide] Not exactly a favourite memory, but... of all the shows I went to in the 2010 Fringe (including our own), all of them except one featured at least one dead or deeply, permanently unhappy queer character. The one that didn't? Was a children's production of The Wind in the Willows. My own fault for choosing to prioritise attending queer-themed shows, I guess... but it was then that I resolved that we needed to start making a special effort to tell happy queer stories too.
• Getting apocalyptically drunk on the last night of the Fringe with Dr Carmilla, Rachael's band and sundry assorted Mechanisms, and wandering the streets at 3am singing 'Vagina Dentata'.

2011: 

• Performing Lashings classic 'You're the Top' with Sebastienne at the Midnight Kabarett and having the audience near-about take the roof off!
• Flyering on the Royal Mile dressed in full-on Victorian Goth mode, and performing flag dances with giant rainbow flags while perched on top of bollards.
• Appearing on Gareth Vile's late-night Edinburgh radio show and having the guests that were supposed to appear after Lashings not turn up... leading to a 1.5-hour long rambling Lashings interview of JOY!
• Hiding out from flyering with Rob in a chocolate/coffee shop and cooking up the idea for Cinderella: A Queer Sort of Pantomime in a burst of sugar-addled creativity. 
• Carlotta's trademark early-morning porridge with peanut butter, brown sugar and strawberry jam... better (for me) than some types of sex, and every bit as sticky. 

I can't wait to make some new Edinburgh memories to go alongside these... if you're at one of the shows between the 9th and the 13th, I'll be the small ginger-blonde blur hovering six inches above the stage in excitement!

Sebastienne

I suppose that I now count as an Edinburgh veteran. This is my third year co-producing a Lashings show, and my sixth year performing. To start with, it was just an excuse to show off - to find myself a fabulous costume and strut around as a panto villain or a high-school goth. I couldn't afford much at all, so mostly went to free shows or just took in all the free street theatre on the royal mile. It was almost like a package holiday - the show's producer(s) would take care of my accommodation, my food, and tell me where I had to be when. All I had to do was just show up and sing...

These days, it's a lot more involved. Lashings operates as a collective, so no-one is just "along for the ride" any more. We've all written and rehearsed acts, planned setlists, built costumes, and once we get here we're contributing by flyering or networking or cooking. We're all much more invested in the show going well - not only have we all had a lot of creative input, but we have a lot of political engagement as well, and a bigger audience means a larger number of people who've heard our message.

Also, this year, we're attempting something new - to stop treating Lashings as a hobby. Our WeFund campaign was part of this, and a corollary of that is that, for the first time, performers aren't being expected to pay rent out of their own pockets. If all goes well, we should make enough money this year to cover our costs for the first time (thank you, so much, to the people whose donations have contributed to this). This is so, so important to the ethos of Lashings - our kind of activism should never be for just those people who can afford to pay.

So, what does this Edinburgh mean to me? It's about getting a chance to really finesse some of our acts by performing them every night for two weeks. It's about getting the chance to bring our message to a much more diverse audience than we might attract outside the adventurous fringe festival context. But, most of all, it's about spending two weeks in a political utopia, where we eat communal vegan food and respect each other's identities and work to make the world better.






Cleopatra

I write this sitting at the kitchen sink.

All right, no, I don't, but I DO write it AT OUR VENUE. (We're doing our tech rehearsal and I'm an extremely last-minute multi-tasker.)

I am somewhat on the fence writing this blog post (as I am in most of life, generally, natch) because on the one hand, this is my first Lashings Fringe experience, and I am so so unspeakably excited. On the other hand, I went to Edinburgh University and have also been a member of the audience, performed in shows and worked Box Office at the Fringe on several different occasions, so I feel like I'm coming home. This also means I feel like I'm coming at the Festival itself from two different angles, both as a local and as a visitor/performer.

Most Edinburgh locals hate the Festival: it's kind of a measure of your cache as an Edinburgher. Unsurprisingly, this isn't an attitude I have a ton of patience with. I love the Fringe, and could fill an entire blog post with all my reasons why. In short, I think it's a wonderful opportunity to level the playing field, we get to perform alongside much more well known and established performers such as Miriam Margolyes, Susan Calman and Sandi Toksvig. As Sebastienne said, it's an opportunity to get what we're saying heard by a much larger audience. I love going back to London in September and seeing which shows are now being performed at the West End (at massively inflated prices). I love that the city explodes with people for a month, that the Royal Mile is jammed with audience and performers alike. I know I'm in the minority but I actually quite like both flyering and being flyered. (I love that flyering is a verb.)

I actually originally first saw Lashings here at the Fringe, because of one of their flyers. My best friend, her girlfriend and I hid out from the rain at the Starbucks on the Royal Mile at the 2010 Festival to go through the flyers we'd been handed and thought Lashings sounded awesome. We loved them so much they were on our 'must see' list the following year.

Even though I've performed at the Fringe before, I've never put this much into a show, both in terms of my time and energy, but also myself and my beliefs. It really does feel like coming full circle somehow. Did I mention the unspeakably excited? I guess I found some words after all.

Valentina

This is my first time at the Fringe, ever, and it's fabulous to be here helping make a show happen. Yesterday was spent ambling the streets, giving wide smiles to shopkeepers and hoping I could persuade them to add just one more poster to their overflowing walls. Today, we're passing the laptop around between sets in our tech rehearsal, and we open this evening. I'm excited! The number of shows happening here is overwhelming, and I'm so glad to be here as a performer, rather than 'just' a consumer of the festival. If nothing else, it simplifies things.

Having done my good share of activism involving serious, negatives-focused consciousness-raising, taking part in something involving song, dance and silly costumes instead feels like a much-needed break. As queer feminist activists, we seem to spend a lot of time living in spaces that are not our own and trying to justify our existence to others. I feel like Lashings doesn't primarily exist to try and get right-wingers on side: we're here to create the shows and the spaces that our communities need. We're here to make shows about us. And with that, I feel like there's an acknowledgement that we don't need to be serious or debatey to get our point across: cheesy musical numbers are a great form of activism for us as performers and marginalised people, they're great for our QUILTBAG audiences, and the logic that dismisses us based on our frivolity is the same one that would brand us as unreasonably angry from the other direction. We may as well have an excellent time singing about carnivorous vaginas.  

Sally

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee-we're-back-at-the-Fringe-we're-back-at-the-Fringe-this-is-so-awesome! – and also, also, there was banana and golden syrup porridge for breakfast, and we have squid soap. *Squid soap*! And we're in the middle of our tech run and there are people singing songs I've never heard them sing before, but they're only singing snippets right now because, well, it's just a tech run, and the whole thing's *so* teasery. Teasery? Yes, that can be a word. This is all very joyous! :D

Poster post 2: race-fail and representation

Posted by Annalytica

This week's post is up earlier than usual, because we're hoping some of you will reply in the comments and we've got limited time in which to take your comments into account.


In Lilka's post last week about the design of our latest poster, she touched on some of the concerns we had about the potential racism in the design process. As she said, the discussion of whether we should use an image of a POC to advertise our show is probably worth a whole blog post to itself, and so this is that post. Because the issues each of us are discussing are closely intertwined, I will be repeating some of Lilka's points in this post, but I'll also be going into more detail about the specific issue of race.

Anatomy of a Lashings Poster

Posted by Lilka

So, we've finalised our poster design for the Fringe festivals we're playing this year. (Reminder: you can still contribute to getting Lashings to Edinburgh, and snap up some awesome goodies, by donating through our Wefund page.) I thought it might be interesting to do a breakdown on how the poster image has been developed, especially since there was a certain amount of Fail during the early stages which we are still processing and trying to learn from. The following post will be quite image-heavy.

Fundraising is a Feminist Issue

Posted by Sebastienne


Being a member of Lashings of Ginger Beer Time is great fun. Sometimes, we get to stand up in front of a room full of politically-minded feminists and queers, and we get to be ourselves and sing silly songs and somehow we get applause for it.

Being a member of Lashings of Ginger Beer Time is frantic. At the Oxford panto gig, I'd invited a bunch of awesome poets & comics to come and perform in the bar, and I didn't get a chance to see any of them because I was running around trying to get the sound desk set up and making sure that the stage didn't fall off its breeze-blocks.

Edinburgh!

Posted by Annalytica

As we may have mentioned, we're heading up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival very soon! The first of us are travelling up on Thursday, which is also the day that marks six months since this blog was launched.



While we're away, we won't be updating the blog regularly, so things will be rather quiet around here for the next couple of weeks. Service as usual will resume in September!

In the meantime, if you're in Edinburgh yourself, here are some shows to look out for:

Batman! Holy Spoof Musical Batstravaganza! featuring Lashings' own Jenni


Mae Day: I'm Not Waving, I'm Drowning: Lashings were lucky enough to see comedian Mae Martin performing live at Red Box. With her quirky, self-depracating style, she is very likeable and very very funny.


Morgan & West: Crime Solving Magicians Morgan and West can be held partly responsible for bringing together several of the Lashers-to-be, back in the depths of Lashings history.Their own show is well worth a look.

And, obviously, you should see Sally and Lashings!