On plastic-free July

Posted by kaberett

Plastic-free July: this is a thing that's happening in Witney, close to the birthplace of Lashings.

It's a nice - even laudable - idea in principle, and I'd love to know if you're engaging (and how you're getting on with it) - but unfortunately as an idea it is also fundamentally inaccessible.

I take 14 pills every day as maintenance. That number goes up on bad days (whether I'm adding in extra paracetamol or codeine or diazepam makes relatively little difference). I haven't even been able to get vegetarian antibiotics: think, for a moment, about how every single one of those tablets comes in plastic bottles or plastic blister packs, and how if I stop taking them I become non-functional within hours.

Then there's the fact that I'm currently without DLA. I shop at the co-op and my local corner shops as much as possible, but making food accessible - making sure I eat - is impossible without plastic. This is, of course, absolutely not true for everyone: but it's simply not something I can find the energy for without serious impact on my ability to do my daily healthwork, the bare minimum of self-care, and the day job that lets me buy food at all.

I'm vegetarian. I use public transport. And I use a power-assisted wheelchair and I work in clean labs that consume vast amounts of energy and produce significant quantities of plastic waste - I cannot do my job without personal protective equipment that always consists of one pair of nitrile gloves and often involves double-gloving, with vinyls over my nitriles. And sure, there is absolutely no sense in which my job is either necessary or useful - except that it seems to be what it takes to enable me to keep doing activism.

I don't know how to balance these trade-offs, and every single time something like this comes up as a campaign I just... I really just want to vanish. I am so, so glad that it is something some people are able and willing to do. I just wish I didn't feel so damn guilty that I can't. By all means, give up your luxuries for ethical reasons: that can be an awesome thing to do -- but be aware that for other people, they may not be luxuries, and that you don't get to make that call for anybody else.

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.

Lashings at NUS Women's Conference 2013

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

A week ago on Tuesday, Lashings performed at the NUS Women's Conference in York - a night we also chose to officially launch our crowdfunder for taking Fanny Whittington to Edinburgh this year! Valentina, Astra, and Cleopatra share their feelings on the gig.

 Valentina writes:

We were utterly overwhelmed at the reception - 200+ noisy, enthusiastic, fast-tweeting, colourfully dressed and well-informed feminist activists, fresh from a long day of discussion and planning, looked absolutely delighted to see us. They cheered and laughed from the moment three Tories jumped onto the stage, a little rushed and flustered from a start time earlier than we'd been expecting, and by the time we'd resurrected Thatcher to tell them all about spin, they were cheering and clapping along in earnest.

Spirits stayed high throughout our 45-minute set, which took in performance poetry, stand-up comedy and singing numbers and covered discussion of straight and queer relationship models in the media, the policing of normative beauty standards, the failyness of transphobic feminists and lots more besides. It was fabulous to hear different sections of the crowd cheer the start of several songs as they recognised them - music inspiration came from Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Wicked, RENT, Mary Poppins and the Buffy musical - and laugh at small asides in the lyrics. (Playing several villains, I found it rather difficult to keep a straight - or brooding, or evil, or patronising - face when standing before such enthusiasm.)

We were helped along by the fantastic techie power of feminist DJ extraordinaire and long-time Lashfriend Ruth Pearce, who ran an excellent dancing set soon after the entertainment. As the NUS had provided hotel rooms, we were able to stick around after our set - it was unusual to not be scrambling to clear away and catch a train afterwards, and we greatly enjoyed being able to chat and dance with our audience into the night. Several people invited us to perform at their student unions, and we even had an offer of publicity help in Edinburgh. The next morning, tired out from dancing and full of hotel breakfast, we returned south still glowing happily over the gig.

Astra writes:

The NUS Women's Conference marked my third gig since joining Lashings as part of their recruitment drive last autumn. And this time, I was doing more acts in front of a lot more people than before.

But the inevitable stage fright beforehand proved totally worth it, as I had a fantastic time. Playing to a crowd that we knew were on our wavelength was a huge amount of fun. The moment they started clapping along to Spoonful of Bullshit, clearly just as delighted by the juxtaposition of Mary Poppins + Tories as we are, I stopped panicking and started performing.

For me it was a particular pleasure to sing 'Dead Girlfriend' for the first time, an act that's meant a lot to me since I first saw it at a Lashings gig two years ago.

It was wonderful to watch other Lashers perform so brilliantly - each poem, song and piece of compering or standup came together to create a very exciting and entertaining set. Ending the gig with a rousing audience participation chorus of 'join the fight with me against hetero-patriarchy' was a delight, and I have no doubt that the activists sat at tables at front of us intend to go on and do just that.

 Cleopatra writes:

I can safely say I've almost never had a Lashings gig like Tuesday's at the NUS Women's Conference in York before. Probably not since I joined up last minute to help with last year's Cinderella Panto. It certainly marked a first for me in that I've never felt so unconstricted by stage fright in my performance. (If you've ever spoken to me before, after, or during a gig, you've probably found me quite short, irritable, and/or aloof. Rather overpowering stage fright at work.) I'm hoping it's a lasting change rather than a one-off thanks to a fabulous audience!

The gig did get off to a bit of an inauspicious start, my entrance was slightly late, due to an earlier start time than we were expecting. The others covered for me like pros, however, and I don't think the audience even noticed the change. Like Astra, I noticed how much they enjoyed Margaret Thatcher giving lessons on how to improve the deficit to the tune of Mary Poppins, laughing and clapping in time to the music. This was an incredible boost and spurred us on through the rest of the set, full of Lashings staples I've loved both as performer and audience member. It was wonderful to be able to focus on performing, rather than doing an adequate job through a haze of nerves.

It also made a lovely change not having to pack up at top speed and clear the venue or make a mad dash for the train. We had a great time afterwards at the feminist disco.

In contrast to Astra's experience as a newer Lasher, if you had told me when I joined that just over a year later I would be the most experienced Lasher at a gig, I would have told you you were dreaming. I've loved so much about my time with Lashings and this gig felt like a real milestone for me in terms of how far I've come as a performer.

We spent a very enjoyable night drawing each others' attention to various tweets from our audience - one Lasher has put these together into a Storify, stored here if you'd like to have a gander.