‘I think it's very impressive.
The design is great, I love the song, and it seems very bold and counter-cultural.
Go for it!’ Ian Rickson, Artistic Director, The Royal Court Theatre, 1998 – 2006

We have been invited to be part of the London International Festival of Theatre in June next year. Your support will enable us to create this wonderful show and be part of the festival.

Angela Carter famously described myths "as extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree." LULU 8 explores myths that are designed to make women unfree.

By playing out the power and pleasures of ‘femininity’, LULU 8 will create an intense topsy-turvy world where the audience may be left shameful and desiring, empowered and vulnerable. LULU 8 will embody transgressive pleasure as revolt and engage the body so that the audience can be transformed by the body and not just by the mind.

LULU’s spectacle of dissent will operate at the level of the senses as opposed to ‘high’ reason and truth. The performances will create a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.

By approaching the sexualised imagery as neither wholly positive nor wholly negative, LULU 8 will explore the system that both empowers and exploits. LULU 8 will explore the feminists’ stern rejection of the ‘sexualised body’ and the postfeminists’ frivolous adoption of sexual display to find out whether these binary perspectives are able to help young women here and now.

LULU 8 will be...

• ...a hybrid spectacle of guerrilla theatre, political rebellion and literary deconstruction.
• ...loosely inspired by Frank Wedekind's classic play, 'Lulu', and features an all-female cast of performers. Each one will embody a different facet of Lulu, through theatre, dance, live art and song, within the vividly imagined microcosm of her cell.
• ...based on an 8 original monologues devised by Deborah Levy (www.deborahlevy.co.uk) who works across a number of media: fiction, performance, visual culture. After graduating from Dartington College of Arts, Deborah wrote a number of plays acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour and visual imagination" (Marina Warner). Her plays have been performed by Blood Group, Women’s Theatre Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company. LULU 8 is closely connected to work that explores self-invention, transient identities, and the relationship between who we are and what we tell ourselves. Jane Edwards described her play Heresies in Time Out as ‘an engrossing, mysterious and highly imaginative exploration of female psyche.’
• ... a radical and inclusive promenade production, bringing together artists from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds, across 11 nationalities. It will operate as a not-for-profit platform for the artists and designers involved, and will be accessible to a wide audience in London and beyond.
• ...politically urgent, exploring the lives of many women of the new millennium who reside in a strangely unsettled in-between space where they are ‘free yet bounded’, inhabiting a contradictory site that is simultaneously constraining and liberating, productive and oppressive.

LULU 8 will be staged in a fascinating historic building in central London. Here justice went hand-in-hand with punishment and captivity, making it an ideal space for a show that imprisons its characters in feminine stereotypes from which they continually try to escape.

LULU 8 will be a promenade production in which the audience will be taken on a tour of eight different spaces each occupied by a female performer embodying a different identity of the enigmatic central character, Lulu. Each performer will give a performance lasting between 5 – 7 minutes before the audience moves on to the next space and character. Gradually, these vignettes build up to tell the audience the complete story of Lulu. Audiences will be admitted to start their tour in small groups every 30 minutes.

HOW THESE FUNDS WILL BE USED
Any donation will go towards the making of the show. So, the kind of things your donation would go towards would be artists’ fees, costumes and design, production expenses and insurance.

Video credits
LULU 8, conceived by Elina Männi Productions
Performed by Eva Magyar, Laura Hocking and Nicky Smith
Text: Deborah Levy
Camera, lights and sound: Barbara Nicholls
Original song: Laura Hocking
Choreography: Marie-GabrielleRotie
Costumes: Yuliya Krylova
Text projections: Magdalena Jachimiak
Edit: Dan Saul
Management: Guy Valentine

THANK YOU to Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club for kindly allowing us to use their space. Motiroti and Four Corners Studio for film/editing equipment and encouragement.