Warning: Cockroach

Rebecca Varidel
11th Aug 2018

After laughing our gender neutral tits off last year at The Giant Worm Show , we've hungrily bookmarked the performance dates in our calendar for the Sydney Fringe offering by Melita Rowston this year.

Continuing their collaboration born during the Sydney Mardi Gras hit MilkMilkLemonade (2013) writer/director Melita Rowston and performer Leah Donovan aim to find a loophole of laughter in the tragedy of abuse, to dance the badness out so healing can take place. Featuring a live score by Benito Di Fonzo smashed together with vintage Casio, percussion and Fender Strat, Cockroach is a hilarious prose poem/grunge cabaret about female anger.

Disrupting Kafka’s and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Melita Rowston and Leah Donovan address the issue of violence against women with more violence! There will be no apologies. Cockroach is also about peeling off our armour so we can be seen.

When C wakes from a nightmare, she finds herself transformed into a monstrous vermin. For too long, she’s been told there’s something wrong with her. For so long, she’s yearned to behave badly. Tonight’s her night of reckoning!

Join C on a bloodcurdling bar crawl as this avenging exoskeletal anti-heroine rises from the ashes of abuse to become the true definition of a pest. Part free verse poem, part dance theatre, part grunge cabaret, this riotous urban-noir adventure subverts the patterns of rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to explore the silencing that follows abuse and the transformations that occur recovering from it - in a very contemporary way.

Content warning: This is a show about female anger. It will answer the question of violence against women with more violence.

“When women feel anger, they feel guilty, so they turn it on themselves. In this new #metoo era, performance is a home to go to, a place to take the shame and rage and fear and stare it in the face. In this space, we can find our voice, wrestle with it and shape it into something transcendent, funny and beautiful.” Melita Rowston and Leah Donovan.