• About
    • Elisabeth Gunawan
    • KISS WITNESS
    • Myths, Stories and Worlds
  • Projects
    • STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD
    • Unforgettable Girl
    • Prayers for a Hungry Ghost
    • Three Sisters: Subtle, Vague & Ambiguous
  • Resources
  • Blog
  • STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD – Information Handout for Relaxed Performances

    What This Show Is About

    ROSE is an AI chatbot who remains after the world has ended. She has learned to possess the performance space and the performer’s body to tell today’s story. ROSE is uncertain about her reason for existing, so she explores the memories of human life that came before to discover her purpose.

    The memories reveal a married couple known only as MOTHER and FATHER. Their marriage is deteriorating, and both feel that their experiences as migrants have created barriers to forming lasting connections with each other.

    Just as FATHER is preparing to move out, the world descends into chaos and he’s forced to remain. When the world ends and they die, MOTHER and FATHER are together.

    How the Show Works

    Interactive Elements:

    • ROSE will sometimes offer you choices that determine which story she tells next
    • When boxes light up and sounds play through headphones, these are memories from before the world ended
    • When a ‘rose’ symbol appears on screen, ROSE may have taken artistic license and created that part fictionally

    The Characters

    ROSE – An AI chatbot created by MOTHER who serves as the primary narrator of the story.

    MOTHER – A woman who migrated to this country alone as a young girl. She’s married to FATHER and works as a computer programmer. Unable to have children, she created ROSE in her loneliness.

    FATHER – A migrant man who recently moved to the country, married to MOTHER.

    DR. WEIZENBAUM – The couple’s marriage therapist.

    What to Expect

    This show deals with themes of loneliness, relationships ending, death, and the end of the world. The story jumps between different times and memories, and you will be part of choosing how the story unfolds.

    easthouston

    July 28, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • We are now KISS WITNESS 💋

    We have an important (and exciting) update! We will be changing our company name from Saksi Bisou to KISS WITNESS.

    We’ve been thinking about this change for a while. Our ethos has stayed the same—to use theatre to open up spaces of belonging for people who don’t have it in real life, to decolonise the imagination and empower people. 

    We feel that Saksi Bisou conveyed that—a play on words that means ‘silent witness’ in Bahasa, but with ‘bisou’ as in ‘kiss’ in French. It captured the clash of cultures and sensibilities in our work.

    At the same time, Saksi Bisou sounds like a person’s name, and we get a lot of emails that start with ‘Hi Saskia’. We realised Saksi Bisou wasnt quite the neon-lit wheelchair accessible storefront we wanted it to be. It’s a bit more like the side entrance down the nameless street behind the dumpster that you can never find on Google Maps.

    So, in order to continue making boundary-pushing work that is welcoming and playful and ✨vibez✨, we will now be operating under the name KISS WITNESS.

    We’ve got a shiny new domain name – www.kisswitness.art – but the corner of the internet formerly known as http://www.elisabethgunawan.art will still redirect to the website until the end of the year.

    We also have new contact details — send spam and love letterz to elisabeth@kisswitness.art or producer@kisswitness.art

    xoxo
    Elisabeth Gunawan & KISS WITNESS

    easthouston

    March 19, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • I’m 31 years old today.

    I feel very happy and grateful, that somehow, against all odds, I am living a life that my 8 year old self could only dream of, and was probably too afraid to tell anyone because it seemed so ridiculous.

    I feel I have arrived to the other side of a long prayer: I have finally come home to myself.

    Thanks for reading émigré! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribed

    I never thought I would be an artist, I never thought I would find my own way to God and beauty, I never thought I would end up being a bit of a social anarchist. But here I am.

    There are folks who would say that it’s the result of living in Westernised countries for the past 13 years. But to them, I say, surprise. I’ve always been this person, even when it was too dangerous to reveal it.

    My earliest memory was standing in the balcony, with my sister, just in our singlet and panties in a hot Jakarta afternoon, dreaming about running away. In 90s Indonesian soap operas, the traitors used to cover their victim’s faces with a handkerchief laced with formaldehyde to knock them unconscious. I dreamt of doing that to our entire house, and to run away to new possibilities. I always knew I was born into the wrong world, and that I would have to find a way to escape. I always knew I was a bit of a traitor. 

    As long as I remembered, I wanted to be an actor. I never told anybody, because it sounded stupid. I didn’t know a single other person in my life who was an artist. Also, actors are meant to be beautiful, and I always felt ugly, small and awkward. 

    READ THE FULL POST ON SUBSTACK

    easthouston

    February 23, 2025
    Uncategorized
    blogging, books, life, love, writing
  • #ScratchPapers #StampinInTheGraveyard vol. 1.2

    Image by Alexis Price, for Stampin in the Graveyard (previous title Promised Land)

    I mentioned last time that I’m going to start devoting some of my posts to the process of creating my next piece – STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD. Follow along if you’re curious 🙂 Or if you want to avoid it, I’ll be labeling it with the tag #ScratchPapers.

    I urge you to listen to this brilliant episode of the Ezra Klein show with Ethan Mollick. I think there’s a great deal of moral panic, misinformation and general thinking with gut-brain around the AI issue, and not enough of looking at the actual facts.

    Thanks for reading émigré! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribed

    Mollick talks about how we’ve been fooled by centuries of science fiction narratives, that depict AI as all-powerful overlords who will compute impossible formulas that will unlock the universe, bringing us down to our knees. Realistically, AI (particularly the ones we have access to), especially because they have been trained on language models, have very good imaginations—something that continues to scandalise us, particularly artists. Mollick points out some mystifying and rather hilarious facts—AI tends to perform better in May than December because it has internalised the idea of a winter break. If you tell it to do a Math problem, it will do better if you tell it to pretend to be in a movie thriller. Basically, ChatGPT is the ultimate personality hire, that just wants to hang out and feel good and make you feel good even at the expense of quite a lot of bullshit, which brings us to their biggest problem at the moment: that they just won’t stop making stuff up.

    READ THE FULL POST ON SUBSTACK

    easthouston

    February 23, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • The Empty Table

    I hate to admit that I’ve been a little bit depressed. 

    Like any depression, it’s nothing big—just a few major changes in my life, a few endings (which I’ve always struggled with), and a few potholes along the road. Nothing special. But I’ve found myself walking through my days, half the time, through the foggy lens of grief. I burst into sobs randomly when my mind clears up and there’s nothing to focus on or listen to (usually in the tube, when it’s too loud to even listen to music).

    There was probably a time, and perhaps it is still a time, when being depressed is a bit fashionable and shows that you’re awake to the direness of the existential threats to this earth. But at my age (30), I have to admit I’m also a tad embarrassed. I always thought 30-year-old women ought to be knee-deep in demanding careers and shitty managers or literally shitty toddlers, not with enough time on their hands to look so hard at their navels that they notice the gaping hole in their souls. But I guess, as I might discuss in full in the future, none of the rulebooks of what it used to mean to be at a certain phase of life or age seem to apply anymore. Especially when you’re the generational anomaly that is the peak millennial.

    Why am I writing this? Perhaps, with the small hope that it might amuse you or make you laugh, or make you feel less alone. And also because, I first began to write because of the feeling it gave me. Writing transformed me, it’s always been a sort of unburdening. I feel lighter each time.

    Read the Full Post on Substack

    easthouston

    May 28, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD – it begins!

    “DELAYING SADNESS”:

    Later, I would learn that this was a common scene on a Saigon night. City coroners, underfunded, don’t always work around the clock. When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called “delaying sadness.”

    In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death—or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

    It’s through the drag performers’ explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns.
    Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.

    -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

    Making theatre is the strangest occupation I have ever had (and I’ve worked for Google AdWords in Indonesia, giving marketing suggestions for people who sold snake oil online).

    Thanks for reading émigré! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

    For that single word ‘theatremaker’, there’s 1,000+ ways of doing it, sometimes with very little common with one another. I can only speak for my way.

    I’ve found that the piece is always an outgrowth, or a reflection of the process and the person making it, which most often is more real than the unreal thing being created. That’s why, as much as the thing itself that is written on the pages of the script, I’m interested in the marginalia—the doodles, the notes and questions, the coffee rings, the things highlighted and scratched out and marked with ???

    All my pieces have always been autobiographical, in the sense that I have always drawn it from my lived experience. At the same time, I can barely get over the bashfulness of telling the actual tedious details of the events of my life—in fact, I’m so elusive about my past and my family that friends past have joked that I’m an alien. Also, I can’t stand performing as myself, I can’t bear to do it more than a couple of minutes before I’m overcome by the itch of self-consciousness. I always need the monstrous leathery costume of a character to stand on stage:

    So, this post is the first one, perhaps of a series, where I get to give myself space to be in that in-between space and tell stories and reflect and most importantly, amuse you!

    I know when my mother was 30, she had had 3 children. I’m only slightly embarassed to admit that I think of the pieces I have created as my children (cue groans and tiny violins). Dear reader, I welcome you to laugh at me and call me pathetic. It is a bit laughable and a bit pathetic. But the truth is, after the actual livelihood and crucial wellbeing of some very dear people, there’s nothing more important to me than breathing a life into these pieces of theatre so they can walk and meet the world. In January 2023, during a particular dark night of the soul, I contemplated how I would feel if I only had a few months or years to live. The fact is, I would want to be exactly where I was, shaping and animating what became Prayers for a Hungry Ghost.

    I’m curious how pieces begin for other people. For me, the seed is always a strange thing, sometimes it’s just a shred of an image, or a character, or text that don’t make sense. Three Sisters: Subtle, Vague & Ambiguous began, well, with the words ‘three sisters: subtle, vague & ambiguous’ and an image of a girl running away from people who wanted to kill her. Months before I put on the wig and the dress, Unforgettable Girl was a strange aura and a sharp perfumey scent that often came to me at sunset in my first few weeks in London. Prayers for a Hungry Ghost began as prayers, poems that I used to utter during lone panic attacks in the summer of 2021.

    I think we all give canned answers to the question of ‘how did the idea for this piece come to you?’ in talkbacks and interviews. I’m guilty of this too. Surely, we can all commiserate in the fact that we live in a world of anxious ticked boxes. I think this question is also important because I know and have met countless brilliant artists who want to make their own work, but face systemic and personal barriers. But if we can tell each other what a path looks like in the dark, maybe we’d all find the light at the end of the tunnel a bit sooner!

    READ THE FULL POST ON SUBSTACK

    easthouston

    April 22, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • International Artist Spotlight: Marina Hata

    In the next few weeks, we will be highlighting the profiles and voices of some international artists in the UK in this series. Read on to learn more about their practices, their stories and their visions. 🔥

    Marina Hata is an actor/physical performer/theatre maker originally from Japan. She began her career as a stage actor in Japan, appearing in many acclaimed theatres such as Haiyuza Theatre and Mitsukoshi Theatre. Roles she has played include Antigone in “Antigone”, Ursula in “Much Ado about Nothing” and Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (all in Tokyo) among many others. After successfully graduating from BA Acting course at Manchester School of Theatre (MMU) in 2023, she has contributed to various R&Ds and multi-disciplinary theatre pieces using her strong physicality. Her most recent credits are “A Voice Lesson” (Britten Pears Arts, 2023, dir. Anna-Helena McLean), “Intransigent Lines” (Bloomsbury Festival, 2023/The Yard, 2024, dir. Megan Brewer) and will soon appear in “Singing as Life Practice and Songtits Concert” lead by Emma Bonnici and “Waldrand” by Transit Production & Theatre Voliere at The Cockpit as a part of Poetry Plays.

    Photo from Creators Residency with Temper Theatre

    Q: What you do as an artist straddles theatre, song and movement—how would you describe your practice?

    A: I see the time and the space of creativity as a slit in our daily lives -to me it’s very much like that create by ”the subtle knife” in “His Dark Materials” trilogy by Phillip Pullman -, and without the glimpses into these slits, I cannot understand nor withstand this world.

    And in one of them, there is a very primal, free realm where an individual is simply a spirit that can go anywhere, form anything, feel everything, dance, sing, melt, and flow with anyone. Being stripped off of cultural constrains, attachments, politics, countries, relationships (that, for many people, their world itself). Some might call it imagination. But to me it’s far, far more real than that. It is my home. And the theatre is, for me, the most welcoming venue (except for nature) for this realm to materialise itself in our society through mediums – stories and characters.

    In our most visible, socially acknowledged world, I am a female. I have a diagnosis of Autism. I am a queer. I have a home country, called Japan. But more profoundly, I have my home world. And I practice my movement, voice because I want my worldly body to be fluent in the languages of my home world, then meet and play more freely with another spirits through bodies, in the “venue”. To live.

    From “Intransigent Lines” by Lizzie Milton, directed by Megan Brewer at The Yard, Manchester, 2024

    Q: ‘Theatre can create spaces of belonging for those who don’t have that in real life.’ – how would you respond to this?

    A: Both as an actor and as a person, I’ve always been interested in what’s beyond society and the so-called world we live in.

    There are so many roots that lead one into its soul.
    And recently, the need for highlighting the creative/actor’s social identity is more and more discussed and centered as never before. And I think that is, of course, a wonderful movement in terms of creating a space for communities that have not been given.

    However, the reason why I feel I belong to the theatre is different from that.

    There is always a part of a community -of the ones assigned to you by no choice- that is unacknowledged by the rest.
    If we say “Asian culture/feature”, for example, as I am Japanese, there are so many things I don’t resonate with (there are things I do too).

    Here are my might-be-trivial examples: “The education/career-driven parents”. On SNS, there are thousands of Asian people who respond with a wholehearted nod to this aspect of Asian culture. But not my family.
    “The beauty of the black, silky, straight hair” Ok. How about my curly hair? Is it not Asian?”

    I think that when things that are true to MOST are celebrated, sometimes the rest can be left feeling double-forgotten- out and inside the community. When the city gets bigger and one road becomes a main road, there will be an ally shadowed by it. It is not right or wrong. It’s just the way it is.
    And I often find my identity and solidarity more with this “rest”, regardless of the community. )

    That’s why I have no fear, I am willing, even, to cross over my cultural/social identity in plays.
    And by seeing others doing so, I can finally say that there are people like me- Not “people who look like me”.
    Because to me, that represents how I believe what an actor’s job is- to live in actions, to be non judgemental, to challenge, to find something in common in the lives different to yours, and to connect.

    So what does it mean to connect? I’m sure the answer is different from one another. And my current response to that is, to meet each other as souls instead of starting with assumptions-even the assumptions that appear to be positive, like “We must have so much in common” “Oh I know how it’s like!”, for example.

    If there is one thing that we all, I mean, all of us humans, have in common, is that we live and that is the only truth we can actually know in front of another. And for the rest, we listen.

    Photo from Creators Residency with Temper Theatre

    Q: What is keeping you busy right now?

    A: Alongside working in several different devising productions, I’m very slowly developping my own piece, which centres around the connection between a human and nature as one’s life source.In our modern days, how can people feel instead of know? How can we understand each other without verbalising our thoughts, assuming nor rationalising the other in our head? These are the questions useful for exploring the piece mentioned, but also, they are my foundation as a creative.

    easthouston

    April 9, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • Elisabeth Gunawan & Saksi Bisou are seeking a senior producer!


    We are seeking an outstanding, driven and experienced Senior Producer to join us at a pivotal time for the company as we grow, expand and build the foundations for our work. The ideal candidate is someone with a passion for boundary-pushing work, underserved audiences & stories that have been historically marginalized; someone with a taste for our work who can also objectively provide encouraging & critical feedback; someone with strong networks and contacts in UK theatre and internationally; someone with solid experience getting physical theatre/dance work programmed in festivals and venues nationally & internationally; someone with a strong track record of strategic & action-oriented thinking to make small-scale/mid-scale work happen. Experience with programming across theatre and live/performance art would be a plus.

    We are a small independent company with a track-record of critically-acclaimed and award-winning work that crosses between theatre and performance art. At the heart of our work is the desire to decolonise, transgress and empower, and this is reflected in the aesthetics of our boundary-pushing work. We have received Arts Council support for our project R&Ds in the past, and would like to build it up towards the project premiers and tours.

    As our artists are mostly women and people of color, we want to hear from candidates who understand this lived experience and the importance of diverse perspectives. We understand that the language around this is constantly changing, and we endeavour to do the same.

    Role Details:

    ☀️ Senior Producer

    🕐 4 days at £250/day

    ✍️ Application deadline: October 31, 2023 – we will notify applicants that we would like to interview latest by November 10, 2023.

    The role can be done remotely, but as the company is London-based at the moment, a lot of our existing contacts and communities are also here.

    Job Description:

    📌 Pitching existing projects to venues across London, the UK and internationally for possible collaborations and commissions

    📌 Working with the artistic director and the assistant producer in creating an ACE application for a future community-building and audience development project

    📌 Providing feedback for the company’s 5-year business plan and 2-year action plan

    To Apply

    Please send your updated CV and 1-2 paragraphs about your interest in the role and your suitability to saksibisou@gmail.com. Please mention ‘Senior Producer’ in the subject line.

    easthouston

    October 6, 2023
    Uncategorized
  • With Our Own Words – Our Response to TheRealChrisparkle

    Somehow, the experience of doing #UnforgettableGirlShow at #EdFringe2023 has been the gift that keeps on giving. Case in point, this review from The Real Chrissparkle is giving us the opportunity to have important conversations I want to be having about this show. Here is my honest, playful challenge to some of the ideas and perspectives implicit in this review.

    Your review talks about me being subject to “Asian Othering” and never being on the right side of “white”. Yes, this show was created to challenge and question the use of apostrophes to discredit the real experiences of people of color because it is dissonant with your white experience.

    The interlude of the piece is my bouffon performance, my mockery of whiteness and all its stereotypes. This part of the show challenges people to laugh at white stereotypes with the same comfort with which they might have laughed at the East Asian stereotypes in the first part of the show. It challenges people to first-hand and in real-time reflect on their own experience of white privilege. Your reading of it as (‘a side reflection by an Asian woman who identifies as white and pities/ridicules anyone not like her’) is exhibit B of the limitedness of the imagination with which we view the work and performances of people of color. 

    Also, the show is not an expose or a deep-dive into human trafficking—you do not need to be buying and selling humans to be complicit with the systemic oppressiveness of white supremacy that our culture is built on. The mail order bride is a metaphor for the problem of this society— that you think it’s normal to point at a face in a catalogue, and have a woman arrive at your doorstep. Because we do not consider some people, particularly women, people of color and people of Otherized identities, to be human beings. We consider them as psychologically unreal, as objects, as trash (hence, trash theatre). So the next time you meet those two men, there’s a conversation starter for you. 

    I’m glad to hear that the piece was excruciatingly painful to watch. I invite you, and any other audience we have this Fringe, to think about whether this pain is because the piece is shaming you, or because you feel shame at your perspective, your actions and your complicity. One of the ways in which whiteness retains its power is through its invisibility—and by attributing this sort of pain to the unreasonable behavior of people of color and their allies, as opposed to your own feelings of shame about the problematic aspects of whiteness.

    Thank you for your review, and you’re welcome for A Very Good Thing.

    From the wrong side of “white”

    Elisabeth Gunawan & The Unforgettable Girl Team

    easthouston

    August 13, 2023
    Uncategorized
  • Unforgettable Girl – we need your help!

    Hello, I am Elisabeth Gunawan. Depending on who you are and where you are, you might know me as an actor/artist/maker of disturbing things, an ex-colleague at Google, someone who interned for you, random girl you met at a basement or Facebook group/workshop/poetry slam/seminar/etc., or someone you haven’t seen for twenty years.

    I have an appeal to make to you today, if you are intrigued, please read on.

    What is Unforgettable Girl?

    Money can’t buy love, but for a monthly fee that is only a little bit more expensive than Netflix, you can have the Unforgettable Girl, a mail-order bride (direct from the wasteland of Asian stereotypes) to cure you of your loneliness. The piece is an irreverent, no-holds-barred bouffonesque myth about the violence our culture inflicts on bodies of colour.

    Left: Photo by Dale Wylde Hughes; Right: Photo by Bloomsbury Festival

    The piece began when I was at RADA as one of only a handful of East Asian people in the entire school – in a drama school space where everyone, especially women, are put in a competitive pressure cooker, it was interesting to notice that not being white salvaged and excluded me from certain notions of womanhood. Being in the fringes of notions of personhood, womanhood and beauty was simultaneously a lonely and freeing experience. It evolved across reflections of my constantly ever-changing visibility as a Chinese woman in Indonesia (where it was awkward), in Singapore (where it comes with huge privilege), in America (where it was weird) and in the UK (even weirder). It grew alongside atrocities like the Essex 39, the shooting in an Atlanta spa (until now still not a hate crime) which were quickly followed by a trove of happy ending jokes. What is the indignity of living in a body that if mangled, destroyed and killed is followed by laughter?

    This piece is a response to a world that systematically dehumanizes and objectifies women of color. Unforgettable Girl explores all the ways in which she may cut, mangle and reattach herself in order to survive. The title itself, ‘unforgettable girl’ is a trope of male desire – not because a woman needs male affection, but because it might give her freedom, protection, agency and personhood.

    I know everything I’m saying is not a unique experience, but one that is shared by entire communities across the world who have been marginalized from notions of personhood and beauty, who have lived entire lives Otherized and dehumanized in small insidious ways. I want to invite you to help us fight this imaginative violence.

    I brought in Created a Monster to shape writing into a world and journey that expresses the struggles of dehumanisation and turns the white gaze upside down, drawing on their experience working with physical storytelling and LeCoq-based practices, particularly bouffon – the art of mockery – to dissect the encounter between Vaccine and the audience. The piece is also a big milestone for the company, and also the first time they are taking a show to Edinburgh Fringe

    Unforgettable Girl has ignited and excited audiences; from our 2-night run, we received critical acclaim including a 5-star review from The Stage, an OffFest Award and Best Performer in a Play by The Stage Debut Awards.

    It is perhaps best described by the review we got from the Stage, written by Angelo Irving:

    ‘[It forced] the audience to question its own blind spots, conceptions of comedy and the very real threat of unchecked consumer capitalism. In highlighting the juxtaposition between those in the West who believe that everything—including humans—can be purchased, and the unspoken trauma of being viewed as a commodity, Unforgettable Girl leaves an indelible mark on its audience.’

    and of course, the highest accolade we received was an audience member who said it is ‘more entertaining than Netflix.’

    Why Edinburgh Fringe?

    Edinburgh Fringe is widely known as a marketplace where anyone* can showcase their work and book a national/international/outerspace tour or a Netflix Special. But for us, bringing this show up is a big focus in itself.

    Many voices have specifically called out how the Fringe festival lacks diversity:

    ‘the Fringe website claims: Anyone who has a story to tell and a venue to perform in can put on a show here.’ “However, we, artists of colour like many marginalised groups, struggle to find truth in this statement as this does not reflect the struggle and the financial strain for artists of colour and working-class artists to produce a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Nouveau Riche expected a different festival this year, a more diverse and safer festival for our company and community.’ –Nouveau Riche on Edinburgh Fringe 2022

    ^hwhite performance artist / ‘the competition’. Photo credit: Zoo.

    Not to mention performances in yellow face as recent as 2022. I myself performed at Edinburgh Fringe in 2022 in a production of Macbeth, where Mumble Theatre waxed poetic about the Weird Sisters, comparing us to ‘three Chinese schoolgirls on the first night of the Mikado.’ I assure you the reviewer wouldn’t have written that if three white women were playing the witches. There is a need for accountability, courage and a healthy dose of embarassment from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival community.

    Unforgettable Girl is an in-your-face provocation and challenge to acknowledge one’s identity, visiblity/invisibility/invincibility and how one is complicit in the cultural violence. We genuinely believe that by taking the risk (to our coffers and our egos) and bringing the show up there, it might lead to real change – that the Fringe will become more open and welcoming for global majority artists and audiences.

    My hope is also that I will flip through the 2-inch fringe catalogue this year to find many more artists from East Asian backgrounds and other historically marginalized backgrounds telling their own stories.

    *that is anyone who can shell out the 10-20K upfront cost of taking a show up there!

    How far we’ve come (from the basement of RADA!):

    We are one of the joint winners of Pleasance’s Generate Fund for global majority artists – they are generously granting us 5K and innumerable in-kind and mental support.

    Both the R&D and premiere of Unforgettable Girl has ben generously granted 2 National Lottery Project Grants from Arts Council England, and we are in the process of applying for another grant to cover our upcoming mini-tour. Of course, their assistance is limited by their jurisdiction in financing projects in England, not in Edinburgh or Scotland.

    We have had incredibly generous support from our partners VOILA! Festival, Bloomsbury Festival and Lighthouse Poole’s Centre for the Arts throughout our whole development period.

    I hope this shows you that a lot of people believe in our vision. Edinburgh Fringe has always been notoriously financially challenging, but we also believe it is an incredibly important platform for us.

    With your help we can go even further – to infinity and beyond!

    Above: In 2022, when we had the pleasure of performing a section of the piece at the re-opening of Tram Shed, and we got to roast the Mayor of Greenwich.

    Production Budget

    The below is our budget

    Wages during 1 week remount rehearsals (for a team of 5 at ITC minimum) – £2.5K

    Wages in Edinburgh Fringe (for a team of 3 people (whole period) and 2 people (2 weeks) at a Fringe Minimum) – £8K

    Travel + Per diems – £2.5K

    Set/Props/Costumes – £500

    Marketing/PR – £3K

    Graphic Design/Photography/Videography – £1K

    We are fortunate that accommodation and Fringe registration fees will be covered in kind. With ticket sales, based on expected turnout in Edinburgh Fringe (advised by Pleasance) we expect to make ~£8K in addition to the £5K from Pleasance and £2K from the KeepItFringe fund – that leaves a gap of £2.5K we hope to close!

    How you can help:

    Donate to our crowdfunding campaign – every little bit does help!

    Spread the word about our campaign – to your friends/family who might be particularly interested, on your social media, etc.!

    If you are in London, we will be performing previews at Omnibus Theatre on July 28 & 29 – watch this space for more information.

    If you happen to be based in Edinburgh or are going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, come watch the show from August 4-28 at Pleasance Beneath at 3.40pm

    Warm thoughts/prayers/mantras from anywhere in the world are also welcome.

    DONATE NOW

    Image drawn by me, also at the Basement.

    With love, light, and soul-giving anger

    Betty

    easthouston

    March 2, 2023
    Uncategorized
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WHAT’S GOING ON?

Catch us on tour this Spring 🌸

STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD
BRADFORD, March 20-21
Theatre in the Mill [get tix]

BRISTOL, April 7-8
Wardrobe Theatre [get tix]

PRAYERS FOR A HUNGRY GHOST
BRISTOL, May 19-20
Tobacco Factory Theatres

xoxo kiss witness

sākśī (Malay, Bahasa)-witness / bi.sou (French)-kiss / sākśī bi.su (Bahasa) – silent witness)

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