A challenging and timely trio of new theatre performance comes to Brighton as part of the Marlborough Theatre’s Radical Softness season, which bills itself as a season of performance interrogating what it means for self-care to be an act of Radical Softness.
The term refers to the perception that emotional vulnerability can be forged into a political weapon and that power can be found in sharing our emotions.
The first show, Bottom, will play at The Marlborough on March 2 and 3 , after a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run. In it, Willy Hudson explores what it means to be a ‘bottom’, in a queer coming-of-age remix about bums, Beyonce and burnt fish fingers that bills itself as ‘for anyone that’s ever tried to be someone they’re not’.
Then, multi-disciplinary artist and writer Louisa Robbin brings her solo show, to care, to The Marlborough on March 6. A ‘ritual’ about the creation of a product for self-care, it explores Robbin’s experience of depression and recovery through the beauty of ritual, self-love and its darker flipside.
Finally, FK Alexander, the performance artist last seen at The Spire in the Brighton Festival 2018 with the award winning I Could Go On Singing (over the Rainbow) will bring Violence to The Attenborough Centre on March 7. This show, a ‘meditation on the cruelty of love, the weight of loneliness, the gift of desperation, the freedom of anxiety, the chrysalis of hopelessness, and the power of dreams’, will combine live percussion, text, ‘non-dance and flowers’ and promises to be as challenging, intriguing and groundbreaking as Alexander’s previous works, which blur the boundaries between art, theatre, music and madness.
