Give Me Your Skin
Give Me Your Skin premiered at Battersea Arts Centre in June 2017. Touring Venues included Marlborough Theatre, Brighton & The Bike Shed, Exeter (opening show of the Boat Shed Festival). Work-in-progress performances at BAC, Mermaid Arts Centre (Ireland) and Camden People's Theatre (as part of Calm Down Dear Festival)
“It’s a seriously fun show... This is a show that connects... people will be at once charmed by its playfulness and surprised by its depth”
— LGBTQ ARTS
Co-created by queer performance makers Tommy Ross-Williams and Oonagh Murphy, with actor Kieton Browne-Saunders, dramaturgy by Lucy Wray and production by Xavier DeSousa, Give Me Your Skin is a participatory show where parlour games meet feminism in a quest to resist masculinity at its most toxic. It is about solidarity, finding your voice, and being kind to one another as a radical act in the face of mass global turmoil. It offers an alternate vision of gender and concrete solutions that liberate boys and men.
“engagingly rebellious...with Ross-Williams and Murphy’s gentle but honest relationship and Kieton Brown-Saunders’ playful, cheeky asides, and there’s a feeling in the space of warmth, openness, and respect”.
— EXEUNT
Developed with support from Arts Council England, Battersea Arts Centre, Shoreditch Town Hall, Old Vic New Voices, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Mermaid Arts Centre and Camden People’s Theatre
Process
A key part of Give Me Your Skin were the workshops with young people which both complemented and informed the show. We cast performer Kieton Saunders-Browne from a workshop and in this way hoped to dismantle the traditional hierarchy between the artistic process and community engagement.
The workshops used a community organising approach to enable young people to make concrete change in their local area. Workshops inspired changes in schools' gender policies and actions in the community to challenge gender stereotypes. Many of the games in the show were trialed and developed in these workshops.
Over the course of the development and performances we worked with youth theatres, schools and community groups including BAC Homegrown Company, TRSE Young Company, East Worthing Community Group: BluePrint 22, Brighton College, Exeter College and & West Exe School.
