In a year when #metoo, gender pay inequality and the feminist agenda has rarely been out of the headlines, 2018 is an especially appropriate time for Gracefool Collective to tour their powerfully satirical Edinburgh hit This Really Is Too Much. West Lancashire audiences can see the show when it visits Edge Hill Arts Centre in Ormskirk on Wednesday 14th November.
Raucous, provocative and laugh-out-loud funny, the four-piece have created a genre-busting show that reveals the downright absurd realities of life as a three-dimensional, high definition, water-drinking, salad-eating, moisturising W.O.M.A.N. in modern society.
In September 2018 the show won The Stockholm Festival’s top award, The Grand Prix Prize for excellence in performing arts.
Slickly choreographed and dripping with feminist charm and anarchic wit, This Really Is Too Much combines dance, dark comedy and theatre. An accessible and humorous exploration of gender inequalities the show delves deeply into a world of farcical stereotypes and preposterous power struggles, wrestling with gender, identity and social convention along the way. After 100 years of women’s suffrage in Britain how far have we really come in that time?
This Really Is Too Much is an outlandish, thought-provoking and wildly entertaining medley of absurd political speeches, talent contests, job interviews and box ticking. The four performers, Kate Cox, Sofia Edstrand, Rachel Fullegar and Rebecca Holmberg, fight themselves, each other and society’s expectations for women to be individual, political, beautiful, popular, in control – and in their place. It includes text from Kate Bernstein’s seminal text – Gender Outlaw”.
“Laughing at systems of power or oppression in order to undermine the power they hold over us is one of the strongest forms of protest”, said Rachel Fullegear.
Gracefool Collective is a four-woman strong company of theatre makers formed in 2013. They make post-intellectual, pseudo-spiritual, feminist-comedy-dance-theatre about the absurdities of modern existence. They aim to provoke, delight, and defy convention through irreverent physicality, sharp writing and arresting characters. Their work tackles serious issues while never taking itself too seriously. The four Gracefool’s (collectively) say that, “This show is for anyone interested in dance, theatre, laughing, crying, feminism, gender, identity, smashing the system, ticking the boxes, beauty pageants, political speeches, salad, moisturiser, water, turtle necks, disco, Steely Dan and/or Barry White”. This Really is Too Much is supported through funding via CATAPULT (Llankelly Chase, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Spin Arts and Yorkshire Dance), Northern Connections (Northern School of Contemporary Dance), CARP (Barnsley Civic), Dragon’s Den (OneDanceUK) and Activate Performing Arts.
Tickets for the performance are priced at £10 and with concessions available at £8. Tickets can be purchased online at www.edgehill.ac.uk/events/arts-centre or by telephone on 01695 584480. Suitable for ages 11+.