Bridget Christie to star in festival of feminist theatre in London

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/sep/19/bridget-christie-festival-feminist-london

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Edinburgh Comedy award-winner Bridget Christie is to star in a festival of feminism on the London Fringe.

Camden People's Theatre will host a three-week festival of performance titled Calm Down, Dear – a reference to David Cameron's response to a female MP during an exchange in the House of Commons. Taking place at the end of October, the festival will feature a range of comedians, theatremakers, poets and cabaret artists presenting feminist-themed productions.

Among the subjects being explored are the representation of women in video games and the Everyday Sexism Project, which encourages social media users to name and shame those responsible for sexist behaviour. Other shows will explore feminist icons, including the Edwardian adventurer Gertrude Bell and the American critic Andrea Dworkin.

The festival aims to respond to a growing movement of feminist thinking and activism that has come to cultural prominence in recent years. Artistic directors Jenny Paton and the Guardian's comedy critic Brian Logan said they decided to dedicate a festival to the subject after receiving a wealth of feminist-themed applications to the theatre's annual Sprint festival for emerging artists.

"This was a festival that really demanded to be programmed," Logan explained. "I've often been told that 'themed festivals' don't really work, because you can never find enough appropriate work around a particular theme. That resoundingly wasn't the case here. We programmed Calm Down, Dear in response to a new generation of – mainly but not exclusively – female artists making work that directly confronted ongoing inequalities and injustices in the way that girls and women live today."

He continued: "We're not the first to notice that feminism is resurgent; feminist work was prominent on this year's Edinburgh fringe, for example. But we saw a need for an event to bring all this work together, to give priority to a new generation of artists, to really focus the energy of this new wave and to ensure that feminist artists from different worlds could speak to one another."

Christie will reprieve her recent Edinburgh award-winning standup show, A Bic for Her, with fellow comedians Sara Pascoe and Rosie Wilby also showing work. Theatremakers involved include the award-winning poet-playwright Sabrina Mahfouz (who will perform her No More Page 3 Campaign Poem), Hannah Nicklin and Kate Craddock, both fresh from the Edinburgh fringe.

As part of the festival, the theatre will also host an open-space discussion dedicated to the question of how best to support female theatremakers, after a survey showed that twice as many men work in British theatre as women.

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