BULLYACHE

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.

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.