EDINBURGH 2023: BODY SHOW Q&A

BWW chats to Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello  to talk about bringing Body Show to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about Body Show

Body Show is a deeply strange, electric, eclectic, dark duet between long-term collaborators and real-life couple Liv Ello (SWARM) and Frankie Thompson (CAttS) about navigating identity, illness and love, surrounded by the trash that’s leftover at the end of the world. Associate Directed by pioneering choreographers Thick and Tight.

What’s unusual about the presentation of it?

We meet our characters in the borderlands of amnesia. They find themselves left in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where logic, sense and capitalism are decaying. From the fragments around them, they try to work out who they were in the world that is now dead and why they’re still leftover…

Body show is an anarchic fusion of lip-sync, clown, spoken word, Trash TV and dance, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating, sometimes both at the same time. But don’t be afraid of our serious topics or our weirdness, the twist is deeply silly!

It’s based off our lived experiences of Gender Dysphoria and Anorexia Nervosa and our belief that a rejection of capitalism could save a lot of people’s lives.

Where else might we have seen you before?

Frankie Thompson’s CAttS directed by Liv Ello, a one woman adaptation of Cats The Musical, had a sold out run at the fringe last year to critical acclaim and Liv Ello’s dark comedy SWARM became a cult hit at Vault Festival 2023 gaining an OFFIE NOMINATION and numerous five star reviews.

Who would you like to come and see it?

Everyone is welcome and we’d love to perform to people who will have never seen anything like this before.

But we’d also say to people who have experiences of the themes - if they’d like to talk to us about the show e.g about potentially triggering themes, please do! We want to make this show in solidarity with the communities that support us and we feel extremely lucky to be able to articulate our experiences.

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

We want this show to empower audiences, particularly individuals who are coping with adjacent experiences, but actually everyone, in finding authentic self love outside of the interference of corporations and advertising. Despite the setting, it’s a hopeful show !

Tickets available here: 

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