Taige Lauren Brings SEARCHERS To The Edinburgh Fringe For Its World Debut

What have we done?

Who are we?

What does it mean to be born out of and into a legacy of profound hope and devastating genocide?

Do the answers to our future lie in the pasts we've forgotten or don't want to remember?

Edinburgh 2019 will be the world debut of Searchers. A show which is surprising at every turn. Part theatre, part rock 'n' roll concert, part spoken word and a totally original piece.

Join hands with Mary and walk off to search for America, at a time when it has perhaps never seemed more achingly mysterious.

Unmoored and uncertain of her future, Mary sets out across America, like many before her: Rock 'n Roll in her veins, hoping to find out what makes an American... well, American. Inspired by some of the country's greatest voices - Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Patti Smith, W.E.B. Dubois, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, John Ford and Willa Cather - Searchers takes audiences along the roads, through the fields, and to the diners, the trailers and the cemeteries of America, jostling constantly with the nation's irresolvable paradoxes.

Mary travels West into the land of the future but finds herself drawn further and further back into a fractured history and layered narrative, teeming with unlikely strangers, iconic locations, music, poetry and origin stories, culminating in her discovery of the dark heart of it all. Traversing the literary, musical, social and historical contexts of 'the land of the free', Mary finds herself asking some unsettling questions...

Taige Lauren writes, performs, sings, speaks and rhythms her way through a solo hour spanning the expanse of America and its paradoxical past; inspired by Taige?'s own existential and poetic wanderings across the nation. Of those formative wonderings, she says "I drove from the West Coast to the East Coast and back. I stood in awe of the mountains in Montana. I walked on the red dirt of the Badlands. I went to Wall Drug (lol). I don't know why, but the trees in Pennsylvania were surprising..."

This is Taige Lauren's first full-length performance, debuting at Edinburgh Fringe 2019. She is a poet, performance artist and singer/songwriter based in Seattle, Washington. She has spent her performance career thus far studying and making devised theatre, practising dance-based work, starring in avant-garde and experimental film, and performing music. She is particularly interested in making work that interrogates trauma and its transference on all levels whether personal, familial, generational or national, and asking the big questions about what it is to be human. She graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in Creative Writing and Drama: Performance. Her talented band are Olivia D. Hamilton on Bass, Kathy Moore on Guitar and drummer Brad Gibson, all bright lights on the Seattle music scene.

Producer Andrew Tsao's career as a producer and director spans decades and includes ABC's HOME IMPROVEMENT starring Tim Allen, NBC's FRIENDS and over 50 episodes of prime-time television for every major network. His extensive professional theatre credits include plays at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Center Theatre Group Los Angeles and Pan Asian Rep in New York.

Searchers runs from 31st July - 25th August (not 12th or 19th) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For tickets and more information: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/searchers