To be honest, free, vulnerable, powerful. He helped me with the writing, the staging, transitions, giving me pep talks when I'd fall into an exhaustion hole, and not least with the astonishing compositions he has created and plays live. Lucien was instrumental (pun intended) in bringing all the pieces of the work together. The majority of the grunt work in creating, producing and choreographing/directing the work was done by myself, but once I started collaborating with the incredible Lucien Johnson, our composer and the musician, the work really came to life. I am so fortunate to have had some amazing collaborators helping bring this work to life - costume, set, lighting etc. How many people did it take to put this show together? We aim to send people into their own behaviours and perceptions and really provoke thought, as well as being straight-up entertaining as hell. Don't get me wrong, the show is just as laugh-out-loud funny and pant-moisteningly scintillating as it is political and intense, but it is very important to me that the values of autonomy, agency and positive representations of bodies, sex, sexuality and eroticism are upheld in everything I make, and The Most Naked is no different. This thing that has been so worshipped, so idolised, so obsessed over and so lusted after, but also very repressed, abused, manipulated, controlled. There are many elements that are touched on but the real core of the piece is this ideal of the feminine form. What political elements does the show touch on? Being able to weave all of this into a cohesive show, to have the privilege of sharing it with so many audience members and receiving such deeply moving feedback has been a very humbling and inspiring experience. It is literally a culmination of my life’s experience of being a woman, a femme, of being fascinated by and creating art that explores ideals of the feminine, the erotic, and the perception that people have of those ideals. While The Most Naked was inspired by and speaks to ideas, themes and happenings that are historical and universal, it is also a very personal statement. What do you enjoy most about the production? Cabaret draws people in and gets them laughing, and then when their mouths are open from laughing you just geeeeently place that little truth bomb in there. It was a way to blend all the things I am fascinated in and feel strongly about in regards to the body, sensuality, sexuality, eroticism and that magic way that art forms like burlesque or cabaret can use easily recognisable archetypes of say, women or femme people, and cleverly stretch, twist and subvert those archetypes until they become something unrecognisable. My main body of work is as a dance artist, physical performer and actor, but I've also been creating very avant-garde burlesque/fetish/cabaret performance works for well over a decade now. How did you become involved with cabaret?
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