BULLYACHE
BULLYACHE is an artist duo creating interdisciplinary, music and dance performance works. They are currently performing three theatre based works; TOM, Who Hurt You? and the upcoming, A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND.
Courtney, whose roots trace back to ballroom dance halls and Latin-American dances, trained at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, and was the winner of the first prize at the International Diaghilev Competition of Choreographic Art. He is also an established musician and filmmaker. Jacob is a multidisciplinary artist with an academic background in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Their work looks into representations of class through the re-staging of pop culture iconography. Together they founded the multidisciplinary project BULLYACHE in 2020 to create works that are an exploration of the emotional and visual overload of contemporary life, through the lens of queer and working-class identity.
TOM
2023
Jacob Samuel & Courtney Deyn (Concept, Direction, Composition), Yen-Ching Lin, Ed Mitchell, James Olive, Lewis Walker, Boston Gallagher, Belen Leroux, Courtney Deyn (Performance), Scilla Rajalin, Oscar Li, Becky Namguads (Rehearsal Direction), Laurie Loads (Lighting Design), Lambdog1066 (Costume Design),Jal Joshua, D’Angelo Castro (R&D), Production 2023 (Fraser Buchanan, Artsadmin)
TOM is set In a holding room, participants wait.
A pageant is about to begin.
No call time, perpetual purgatory.
TOM is a look at the insanity of bureaucracy, institutional power and performed compliance that is ever present in our lives. Six performers draw on their real-life experiences of being; a world champion gymnast, backing dancers for Dua Lipa and Kylie, NDT and Akram Kahn, legendary Voguers, ballroom dancers, and B-boy’s. Contained within a live pop music-video that never ends.
We blend the myth of Orpheus with the DWP, in a vertigo- inducing pop-culture collision of working class and queer expression. Featuring original live music and dance, TOM oscillates between hyper-speed pop, ambient waves and auto-tune vocals. BULLYACHE and cast burst into song, fight, fuck, live, laugh, love, to dissect the heavy price of being in a world that demands too much.
BULLYACHE, TOM, 2023
Who Hurt You?
2024
Jacob Samuel & Courtney Deyn (Concept, Direction, Composition), Lewis Walker (Rehearsal Direction), Oscar Li, Courtney Deyn, Barbs, Magnus Westwell (Performance), Lambdog1066 (Costume Design)
WHO HURT YOU? is a radical re-imagining of working-class choreographer Kenneth McMillian’s ballet L’historie de Manon mixed with the erotic thriller Showgirls and portrays the distressing story of champion boxer Jake Lamotta, starring in an autobiographical play, written and directed by his seventh wife, while suffering from the dementia caused by his job.
An examination of bourgeois ideals; their detached beauty and heteronormative power over their subjects; WHO HURT YOU? explores the avenues of survival available to us within the spectacle of our contemporary commercial culture.
BULLYACHE, Who Hurt You?, 2024