Venue: Pleasance Dome (Venue 23), Dates: 1 – 25 Aug 2013 (not 5, 12, 19) Time: 17.45 (ends 18.45) Tickets: £12/£10 (previews 1, 2 Aug £7)
New show from Princess of Performance Art Bryony Kimmings and her 9-year-old niece……expect matching Laura Ashley outfits and heavy weaponry!
In an audacious, provocative protest against the world’s flagrant attempts to sexualise and commodify childhood for profit, award-winning performance artist Bryony Kimmings and her 9 year-old niece Taylor decided to take on the global tween machine at its own game.
Invited by Bryony to invent a new a role model as an alternative to those currently available to her, Taylor came up with museum-working, imagination-championing, bike-riding, tuna-pasta-eating pop star Catherine Bennett. Knowing that the best language to speak to young people was pop, Bryony duly promised to embody Catherine Bennett, enlisting former Girls Aloud make-up artists, ID magazine stylists, X Factor wig experts, prolific pop producers and a pack of publicists. She vowed to follow Taylor’s brief and make CB famous… like WORLD FAMOUS. Bryony wanted to prove to Taylor that an alternative role model in mainstream popular media was possible… as a gift from her Aunty.
This is a show for adults about taking charge of your own destiny, picking your battles, fighting the global corporate machine and the legacies we pass down through our families; Bryony and Taylor are onstage together exploring their David v Goliath struggle against the pop-media cacophony. With David Curtis Ring’s trademark costumes and sound scores by Tom Parkinson.
Bryony and Taylor were inspired by the increasing evidence of damage caused by the sexualisation of kids, the endless objectification of the female body in the media, large growths in youth narcissistic personality disorders, increasingly violent video games and the concerns of parents all over the world. This 2-year long project is made up of the Catherine Bennett fame experiment, a theatre show, a documentary and an education project. It does not seek to censor but to inspire debate and personal action amongst kids and adults.
This is Bryony’s third Fringe show. Since debuting in 2010 with the Total Theatre Award-winning Sex Idiot and 2011’s 7 Day Drunk, performance art princess Kimmings has taken her shows to venues all over the UK, Europe and the US. She is inspired by the taboos and anomalies of British culture, airing her own dirty laundry to oil conversations on seemingly difficult subjects through real-life social experiments embarked upon with genuine genius intrigue and wholehearted, fearless gusto
John graduated from Telford College in 2010 with an HNC in Practical Journalism and since then he worked for the North Edinburgh News, The Southern Reporter, the Irish News Review and The Edinburgh Reporter. In addition he has been published in the Edinburgh Evening News and the Hibernian FC Programme.
