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.

What's in a name?

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

This week's blog post is something a little different - below, a number of Lashers share the story behind their Lashings names! We figure that regular readers might find it interesting, and that potential new Lashers might be find it useful when it comes to thinking of their own stage names...



Galatea
When I’m feeling particularly dangerous, I perform under the full stage name ‘Galatea Gorgon’. I acquired the first part of the name from an appallingly creepy story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which we’ve performed as a dance piece from time to time -- the sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted by the lewdness and crudeness of human women, decides to make himself a perfect girlfriend out of ivory and sleep with that instead: a bit like an Ancient Greek version of a RealDoll. He ends up falling in love with this beautiful inanimate statue which never talks back, and eventually the goddess Venus makes it come alive so it can marry him. Bleargh. I think that in 21st century culture, a lot of women are encouraged to be our own Pygmalions, shaping ourselves into perfection for other people’s benefit while keeping as quiet as possible; shoving any inconvenient messiness or imperfection out of view. The Gorgons, meanwhile, were completely the opposite -- they’re female monsters from very early Greek mythology, and so outrageously fierce and ugly that one look at them will turn you into stone! Put together, I think these two names speak to a really interesting tension, particularly since most of my performance is dance-based and I rarely speak directly to the audience. I like the idea of playing around with the gaze, looking and transfixion -- when I dance for you, is it about beauty or about horror? Who is being brought to life, and who is being turned to stone?


Sebastienne
This is a name I’ve been using for at least ten years, now. It’s a feminised form of Sebastian, as in Saint Sebastian, who’s been a site of deeply queer and kinky imagery for some centuries. He’s generally portrayed bound at the wrists and bleeding, pierced by phallic objects. Ahem. Anyway. After leaving prison, Oscar Wilde used the name ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, in what I’ve always considered to be a nod to posterity - to the idea that he might be (as he now is) considered a queer martyr. “Sebastienne” was only ever meant to be one half of my psyche, the other part being designated “Alia”.. but we don’t hear from her much, any more. (That’s not quite true; I’d say there’s been a reintegration. Alia’s still around in my gender identity and my politics; but I have Sebastienne’s sexuality and sense of style.) The divide was a necessary consequence of my adolescent inability to reconcile my belief in social justice and the importance of truth (Alia) with my Wildean conviction that “pleasure is the only thing one should live for” and the importance of artifice (Sebastienne). Lashings is where I learnt that it is entirely possible to embody both these things.

Goblin
at some point in my anorexic early 2000s, i dropped to 2 1/2 stone and ended up in hospital, in starvation psychosis. seeing my reflection in a hospital mirror in my delirious state, i thought i was a goblin. And then, as i recovered, it kinda stuck - still, a significant proportion of my friends call me Goblin. Like a number of anorexic girls, i used to adore the symbolism and images of angels and elves, their effortless perfection - for me, referring to myself as Goblin, implying all my skinny gawky pudgy glory, is part of embracing my many imperfections instead of striving for impossible perfection. Also, it suits me, and i think the ears are cool. ;-) 


kaberett
I’m a singer; my first language is German; and I’m decidedly political. And the deliberate misspelling of the German “Kabarett” - a word that is suggestive of cabaret as political satire? Well, that’s for reasons to do with my wallet name & a slightly unhealthy love of anagrams: so my stage name comes from the handle I invented for commenting on political blogs. In news that will surprise no-one who’s ever met me, I am indeed entirely too delighted by my own cleverness, at least when it comes to multilingual puns.


Orlando
I took my stage name from the eponymous hero of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando. It was actually CN who suggested I use it, after reading an essay I wrote about the novel, but it fit so perfectly that I now can’t imagine using anything else. The character Orlando is born a boy in the Elizabethan era: the book follows them through a surreal and dreamlike version of history, during which they age very little over several hundred years, undergo a mysterious change of sexed morphology, and begin presenting as female, male, and neuter in different contexts. Orlando is openly gender-fluid and bisexual - they ‘changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive… and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally’. The book has a lot to say about the cultural construction of gender, and I feel that the gender-fluidity of the main character speaks a lot to my experiences, despite the fantastical nature of the story.


Valentina
I turned my surname, Valentine, into my stage name! Valentine came from my looking for something that sounded awesome that also went with my blog’s name, Silicone Valley, and is extra-excellent because it’s also the name of the villain in Mortal Engines, which is basically one of the greatest books ever. Yay! My name rocks.

Cleopatra
This is my full real-life name. Natch. I’ve almost never used it in English-speaking day to day life, it feels a lot like a best Sunday dress, too much for everyday use. Plus, it’s a mouthful. (In GREEK it sounds fine.) I’ve wanted to be on stage for basically for ever and at some point my best friend and I coined the idea of keeping my full name for a stage name, so when people started telling me to pick a Lashings name there was never really any other choice. (Plus, I am a Classics nerd so it has that going for it too. Galatea was rooting for Patroklos based on this. ;))

Nigel Newt
I'm a Nigel - that friend, relative, partner or other close acquaintance, who seems to understand enough of the principles of feminism to not be completely unbearable.  I make some contribution for the easy stuff, like the housework, or generally progressive causes.  But I also get something of a free pass - I'm shown more patience when I inevitably show my privilege. Newt is a female character in "Aliens", who gets to talk to Ripley (another female character) about monsters - fulfilling all three requirements in Dykes To Watch Out For's "The Rule" .  As my first role in Lashings was the increasingly grumpy recipient of all the token female roles from popular sci-fi & fantasy, this seemed an appropriate aspiration.

Florestan
   It has two famous uses as a name for characters in classical music. First, it is the surname of heroine, Leonore, and her imprisoned, starved husband, in Beethoven's opera Fidelio. She disguises as a man (called Fidelio) and rescues her husband from political prison. I like having a name that belongs to both male and female, being somewhat genderqueer, with the female displaying strength. 
   It is also a name used by Robert Schumann, a brilliant composer who experienced quite complex mental health issues in his short life. He often wrote words and music signed with the names Florestan and Eusebius, who represented contrasting aspects of his personality. Florestan was the exuberant, passionate and - in my imagination - slightly out of his own control side.
  So we have a heroine/boi, a man she saved (both all-singing), a fictitious wisp of borderline personality disorder and a source of wild, imaginative music and musical philosophy; Florestan.


... so there you have it! Readers who have chosen their own names, whether for the stage, the internet, as a new legal name, or in any other venue: is there a story behind yours? We'd love to hear it!

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

London Pride 2012

Posted by Cleopatra

So I went to World Pride in London on Saturday. Pride, to my mind, is one of those things that come round once a year, like your birthday or Christmas. You wander into Soho, you watch the parade, you go check out the rally and booths in Trafalgar Square, meet as many of your queer friends as you have the energy to find in all the crowds. (Then depending on said energy levels, stay out and drink for a bit or go home.) I’ve gone every year I’ve been in London since I started identifying as queer.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Posted by Cleopatra



So I went to see Snow White and the Huntsman this week and I have a lot of feelings about it, so I thought what better place to put them than the Lashings blog.

(I’m going to talk in some detail about various choices the film made in their re-telling of the Snow White fairytale so spoilers for stuff like that. However, if you are familiar with the fairytale, there are not really going to be a ton of surprises here, except for interpretation/artistic choices/that sort of thing.)