A new show about women in music.
A tale of growing up, finding a voice, and listening to Joni Mitchell records.
Heading to Buxton Fringe this summer.
By Genevieve Carver & The Unsung
Theatre | Spoken Word | Music
Winners for Excellence in Spoken Word, Buxton Fringe 2017
***WATCH TRAILER***
“I am thirteen years old. I feel very grown up, and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to do with my life - I’m going to ‘be a famous musician’.”
Based on interviews conducted with female and non-binary practitioners across the music industry, A Beautiful Way to be Crazy is a tale of growing up and finding a voice. Weaving together spoken word poetry, storytelling, live music, audio clips from the interviews, and some genuine teenage diary entries, award-winning poet Genevieve Carver and her multi-instrumental live band (Tim Knowles, Brian Bestall and Ruth Nicholson) explore what it means to be a girl in the business of music – with a little help from Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and Delia Derbyshire.
Artist Statement:
Back in 2017 I read an article revealing that 70% of music acts in the UK are all-male. When it came to areas such as sound-engineering, women made up less than 2%. I just couldn’t believe that this was because women are simply not interested in music, so I started talking to all the female musicians I knew to try and see what was going on. This was also a time when I was starting to realise a lot of things about my own journey into performing – the confidence I lacked as a younger woman, the way I always felt the need to apologise for taking up space in the world. “The Unsung” has always been about bringing to the fore the stories of people who otherwise wouldn’t be heard, so it felt right to talk about my own experiences alongside a diverse range of other voices, and I started to interview people more formally and gather together their responses for the project. The interviewees were diverse in terms of ethnicity, class, disability, sexuality, music genre and practice type, and ranged from cis-female to trans, intersex, and non-binary.
Praise for Genevieve Carver & The Unsung: