Finding Melania at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

We are fundraising to take our show, Finding Melania, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year! We'll be performing right in the heart of the Fringe at Underbelly's Bristo Square from the 16th - 29th of August. Tickets at https://www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/events/event/finding-melania 

 

About the Show

One-woman clown show Finding Melania is a twisted dark comedy about the fascination and lure of masculine power and the women who submit all.

Melania - once an enigmatic beauty, now pretty much forgotten - is discovered years later still living somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House. Holding on to her husband's belief that they will one day return and Make It All Great Again, she welcomes ‘an audience with Melania’ and lives out her memories, dreams and fantasies. A dark clown show exploring the grotesque behind the glamour and what it takes to ‘stand by your man’. Drawing on dictator wives, populist methods, karaoke and asking an audience to consider our own responsibility in the making of a monster.

 

Merging clowning, absurd and dark comedy to explore the grotesque behind the glamorous facade of Melania. What did it take to prop up Donald and his authoritarian demands? Finding Melania offers a brutal interrogation of women in positions of power through a grotesque caricature of an aged Melania Trump reliving her memories in an isolated dystopia. We ask audiences to question the role of women who prop up monstrous authoritarianism, what does it take to play the role well and what is left when the dictator inevitably falls? The show is examining how the patriarchy has defined women’s expectations and our historic complicity in its continued success.

Audience Reviews
"Denise is an absolute joy to watch onstage, I loved her energy, warmth and wit."

"This show was awesome -it was one of the clearest, most political, true observations of a character I have seen and I enjoyed every second."

"Visually stunning, hilarious props and costumes and the talent of a first-class comedienne."

“Melania! What a wonderful theatrical creation!! Her existence, brought alive with beautifully judged clowning, is ridiculous, yes, but also more than a little sad. Funny, complex, and human."

"A totally original show, with imaginative staging and direction, and a brave and very funny performance."

"I absolutely loved ‘Finding Melania’. Hilarious, laugh out loud funny but also completely gripping."

 

Who's Who?

Finding Melania is a female-led collaborative project led by Denise Stephenson with director / dramaturg Sarah Calver. The collaborators involved come from different schools of discipline, and bring their own practice to the project. Collaboratively the work is political, absurd, physical and grotesque.

 

Denise is an actor and writer. Denise is exploring Bouffon Clowning, Theatre of the Grotesque, and focusing on physical vocabularies rather than a text-based process in an attempt to discover a new process of making work which moves away from her classical training and allows for a liberated approach to building character and narrative.

 

Sarah Calver is a theatre-maker; director, writer, dramaturg and actor. She is based in the UK but works internationally and is the Artistic Director of Flight of the Escales Theatre Company. Sarah works with deconstructing narratives and forms to explore the alternative stories and the lesser explored perspectives. She is interested in theatre that reflects and represents the human experience and how we navigate our way through the world.

 

Sam Cambell is a Creative Producer and Stage Manager originally from Sydney Australia. They are interested in creating politically and socially relevant work that reflects the world we live in, with an emphasis on queerness and drag. They are interested in collaborative and accessible practice and finding non-normative forms in performance.

 

The work is produced by Ellandar, a new multidisciplinary theatre company committed to pursuing diverse and inclusive work, both in form and content. Co-founded by a gay man and a mixed-race British Southeast Asian muslim artist, Ellandar actively support British-Muslim and LGBTQI+ artists in developing work about their lived experience.

 

Why are we going to the Fringe?

The fringe offers a unique launching pad to international audience. Our ultimate goal for Finding Melania is to perform it in international settings to a variety of audiences. Being a clowning piece, Finding Melania will develop in front of audiences. Performing in front of multiple audiences is important in understanding how we can co-author moments of theatre with audiences, especially as we get used to live theatre again. Audiences bring the piece a level of complicity and evolution for the character and performer. The fringe offers a unique opportunity to perform in front of multiple audiences, bringing in people who may not ordinarily pick a show like this. The fringe offers a period of development with audiences, giving space and time for Denise to experiment and understand the interaction between this character and the public.