Artists Of Colour In The Spotlight In 5th Annual Calm Down Dear Festival

Join the vanguard of feminist theatremakers in the battle for gender equality at CPT's Calm Down Dear festival, which this year is foregrounding stories from artists of colour. Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the 2018 festival offers a varied programme led by Racheal Ofori and Heather Agyepong's So Many Reasons (16 Jan - 3 Feb), an exploration of motherhood and generational divides told through the eyes of a British Ghanaian woman, which asks what happens when we realise Mums don't know best.

So Many Reasons follows the success of Racheal's debut show Portrait, which was performed at Calm Down Dear 2015, the Southbank Centre's Women of the World and broadcast on the BBC. Both shows are produced by female-led Fuel.

So Many Reasons is the second recipient of a Jerwood Charitable Foundation Home Run commission, following Milk Presents' Bullish in Autumn 2017. This award enables CPT to work with a company or artist towards a three-week run of a fully realised production at the theatre, supported with a £5,000 cash commission and free rehearsal space, as well as artistic, fundraising, marketing and business planning support.

Women's roles as mothers and daughters (and friends and lovers) also comes under consideration in The Gentle Art of Punishment (18-20 Jan) from Canada's Daughter Product. Initially performed at Montreal's ZH Festival, the show sees three women unravel their girlhoods, idols and ideals in a nostalgic, dream-like narrative of choreography and theatre.

Other highlights of the festival include SEXY (31 Jan- 3 Feb) by Vanessa Kisuule, which takes a playful look at the fraught relationship we have with our bodies and the notion of sexiness and Vanessa Macaulay, whose Enticement Machine (23 Jan) exposes the humour and horror of expectations placed on the racialised female body via twerking and make up tutorials.

There'll also be the chance to have a first look at brand new shows including Caroline Horton's work-in-development All of Me (26- 27Jan), a darkly comic one-woman show about the story after the story's end and wanting to end it all. Libby Liburd, creator of Muvvahood, presents Temporary (28 Jan), which explores the reasons for the surge in temporary accommodation and the emotional effects of women and children housed in it.

Artistic Director Brian Logan said "We couldn't be more excited that Calm Down, Dear is celebrating its fifth birthday. In 2013, calling your show - or your festival - feminist felt like a bold, even a risky, decision. But the first CDD was a huge success for us, and what was conceived as a one-off festival has returned annually ever since. Five years on, we've been overwhelmed with the volume and quality of proudly feminist submissions to this year's event, and - more widely - by the range and creativity of current feminist theatre-making. CDD18 offers up a thrilling cross-section of that work, foregrounding two shows - So Many Reasons and Sexy - that bring diverse perspectives on feminism centre-stage."

Camden People's Theatre is a central London space dedicated year-round to supporting early-career artists - particularly those making work about issues that matter to people right now. Its mission is to refresh and strengthen the performance sector with a new generation of artists who bring a fresh perspective to contemporary concerns, and create new artistic forms with which to address them; and to present their work to a new generation of audiences.

CPT regularly stages festivals of adventurous theatre exploring contemporary social, political and cultural issues. Recent examples include: Hotbed: a Festival of Sex (2017), Whose London is it Anyway? on the housing crisis (2016) and Shoot the Breeze on environmental issues (2017).

For more information visit www.cptheatre.co.uk.

Image credit: Vanessa Kisuule

Need more UK Regional Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...