ThisEgg's Award-winning DRESSED. To Tour UK

dressed. premiered at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim, winning a Scotsman Fringe First as well as a nomination for ThisEgg for Total Theatre Awards' Emerging Company 2018. The intimate show created by four school friends is to tour the UK, using storytelling, live sewing, music, dance and clowning to turn a traumatic experience into something beautiful and resilient; a show about reclaiming one's body, female friendship and the integrity of clothes to identity.

After being stripped at gunpoint, Lydia Higginson sought to redress herself by creating her entire wardrobe from scratch. In 2016, Lydia, a seamstress and costume designer, gave herself a year to make all her own clothes, after which she gave away all those she had ever bought. Friends since school, Josie, a theatre maker, Nobahar, a singer, Olivia, a dancer, and Lydia, took this act of reclamation and self-liberation as the basis of their show to celebrate the power clothes have to define, liberate, hide and embellish.

Josie Dale-Jones says, We started making dressed. in July 2017. In November 2017, the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke out. This changed both everything, and nothing; in the way we made the show, in what we were exploring, and in how we saw ourselves as women in the world. When #MeToo gained momentum though, it did feel like a rally cry, a howl back to keep going; amongst the wider movement for change, there was a need to hold on to personal journeys, for individual voices to be heard . Lydia Higginson adds, "When you devise theatre, you are trying to create a world that the audience can believe in. For the last decade, the three women I created dressed. with have been rebuilding my world into a place I can believe in. Last year we decided to create dressed. for women whose worlds have been shattered, and for all the friends who have helped rebuild them."

ThisEgg is Josie Dale-Jones who self-produces shows with a variety of artistic collaborators. ThisEgg makes intimate theatre that connects with audiences, moving them to laugh, cry and imagine; prompting them to ask big questions about the world we live in. ThisEgg devises original work which mixes theatrical styles, celebrating different forms of entertainment. Me & My Bee was the winner of the inaugural Les Enfants Terrribles Stepladder Award 2017, The Fringe Sustainable Practice Award and Brighton Award for Excellence. Goggles won the NSDF Edinburgh Emerging Artists Award 2016. the egg, Theatre Royal Bath have appointed Josie a Leverhulme Arts Scholar 2019, where she will be working on a new piece The Family Sex Show (Working Title). ThisEgg won the inaugural Underbelly and New Diorama Untapped Award for early-mid career theatre companies run by Underbelly and New Diorama Theatre.

Lydia Higginson, her project, 'Made My Wardrobe' and the reasons behind it is the catalyst for dressed. Lydia has worked alongside directors, producers, technical crew & performers providing bespoke costumes for theatre, dance, circus and live performance. Her credits include working on wardrobe for Sadler's Wells, Tobacco Factory Theatres & Bristol Old Vic. When she is not working on commissions, she teaches others how to sew from her studio Threadworks.

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