Countdown to the Evolve 2020 Shepparton Arts Festival
The Shepparton Festival, EVOLVE 2020, kicks off in just nine days. There’s a smorgasbord of events to choose from, with everything from performance to film, workshops to feasts and much more. This year the festival is proud to present three comedy cabarets, featuring both home-grown talent and famous faces from the big screen.
‘Women of The White House’, starring creator, performer and once-local Sam Coats, who first performed at Hares and Hyenas in 2019, and continued on to the Melbourne Cabaret Fringe Festival and Fringe at the Edge of the World in Tasmania, where it was nominated for Best Ensemble and Best Cabaret. It’s a comedy that promises to make cabaret great again! An all-singing, all-dancing, part drag, all wigs, tell-all expose of true facts, fake news, and modern-day right-wing conservative feminism from inside the big orange world of Trump.
Next it’s ‘Blak Cabaret’, a raucous addition to the festival, starring some of Australia’s finest Indigenous comedians including Kevin Kropinyeri and Elaine Crombie. Kevin, a Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow regular, is a bona fide star of the Indigenous performing arts scene. He is one of Australia’s most established and popular Aboriginal comedians with a long list of Australian TV credits. Elaine Crombie is an actress and composer, known for Nowhere Boys (2013), Top of the Lake (2013) and Top End Wedding (2019).
Hosted by Rumbalara Football Netball Club (RFNC) and Malthouse Theatre, you will be captivated by a night of sparkling variety that assembles some of Australia’s finest Indigenous musicians, comedians and dancers on stage in RFNC’s social room. Celebrate with an uproarious and subversive party that lights up the night!
And finally, “Ovariacting: A Period Drama”, is a riotous and informative cabaret about periods and endometriosis, performed by Jamie Boiskin and her band of merry menstruals. Watch them fight period stigma with slut drops, tampon bullets and a RuPaul inspired uterus.
Jamie, a music theatre performer who is riddled with Endometriosis, is joined by menstrual activist protégé Thomas Bradford on piano, drag queen uterus Laganja (Alice Albon) and T.O.M The Time of the Month Tampon (Louise Cumming). Written by Jamie and directed by Fiona Scott-Norman, Ovariacting is an hour packed with fabulous costumes, songs, props and performance art. Inspired by Jamie’s journey with endo, polycystic ovarian syndrome, her cranky uterus, and a heinous 35 day long period, Ovariacting is a masterclass in how to talk about normal bodily functions without pulling a face and saying “She’s got the painters in”.
Women of the Whitehouse – Friday 20th March 2020
Blak Cabaret – Saturday 21st March 2020
Ovariacting: A Period Drama – Thursday 26th March
For more information head to the festival website www.sheppartonfestival.org.au, with tickets from just $15pp, spots are selling fast.
