Quartet capturing the times and what it means to be female now
IN A year when #metoo, gender pay inequality and the feminist agenda have 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, November 14.
Raucous, provocative and laugh-outloud 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.
Gracefool Collective is a four womanstrong company of theatre makers formed in 2013.
They make post-intellectual-pseudospiritual-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 Gracefools (collectively) say: ‘‘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’.’
For more information and tickets go to www.edgehill.ac.uk/events/ 2018/11/14/this-really-is-too-much/ or call the box office on 01695 584480.