Cockroach World Premiere

@ Seymour Centre

$26 / $21

“I am Cockroach. You sever my head, I keep living. You take away my oxygen, I survive. You deprive me of water, food, I carry on. I am Cockroach. I walk through rot and filth and shit. I go where darkness thrives. I speak for the weak and downtrodden, the outcast and disenfranchised.”

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. We are done with smiling politely.

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.

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 also about peeling off our armour so we can be seen.

“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, 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.

Cockroach is an anthem for our times: furious, funny and hopeful.

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

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