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Bait: Kill the Princess

 
Brian Felsen Review by Brian Felsen 5 Published: 17 Aug 2019 Heroes @ The SpiegelYurt Show Dates: 1 Aug 2019-25 Aug 2019

Princess dresses and cleaning supplies turn into painfully comical horses, lakes, capes, ans tents for you to hide in. Two highly polished physical actors get up close to you and make clowning magic happen through laughter, tears and gasps. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, things that could seem completely commonplace and mundane appear in a different light and make a different kind of sense, right here in the whacky heart or the Fringe, the magical Spiegelyurt.

Weird and polished physical theatre with a message about the princess trope

A lot more hides behind the label "clowning" than many or us realise (or maybe that's just me?), and this show is an experience and a showcase of just how much creativity and new ideas clowning can encompass. Prepare to be gently challenged to take part and interact with charismatic actors switching into all kinds of roles you'll recognise from fairytales, but will see in a completely different light here. These figures will drag you through a journey turning the "princess" trope upside down and twist it every way to rethink, retrace, and replace it.

Audiences will become part of an embodied physical meditation on what it means to be a princess, and why the ideal is both culturally engrained in, and emotionally dangerous to, women and girls. A tricky grounds to navigate in movement and stage props, but this show does just that. This show will make you think, and ask yourself. What are women supposed to embody? And why is it so painful to do? Who says that women need to aim to become princesses, or that it would even be good for them?

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The Blurb:

What happens when the glass slipper doesn’t fit? Is it time to put a bullet in the princess’ head? In a savagely playful subversion of identity, Lecoq/LISPA-trained clowns, poets and storytellers Lizzy Shakespeare and Michelle Madsen upend beliefs and expectations in a fantastic game, using clown, spoken word and live art to create a genre-defying work which teases and provokes. ‘Seriously challenging in the most ludicrously enjoyable way’ **** (BroadwayBaby.com). ‘I've seldom seen two faces quite so perfect for clowning’ (BrightonandHoveNews.org).