The Roaring Girls are getting beach body ready
[Applause]
[Music]
hello
all right how’s it going um right
i’ll start us off i’m not stood there
oh christ welcome the chaos
so three years ago in 2017
myself rachel and lizzy we went on a
trip to the theater
treat ourselves nice night out and our
mate at the end of the night says
hey girls do you fancy a lift home now
it was very cold it was january so we
gratefully accepted
and her sister was driving so as she
pulled into the lay by outside of the
theater
our slim mate got in the front
now we were immediately met with two
thoughts
number one we should have definitely got
the bus
and number two was that we were now
gonna have to cram ourselves into the
back of a ford fiesta
now i don’t know if you’ve ever seen
three fat lasses try to balance
themselves over the axle of a car
but let me tell you it took a lot of
shoving a lot of giggling
a lot of swearing and how we managed to
close the door was only by the grace of
god
and something magic happened once we
managed to get ourselves
into that little car we had a
conversation that we had never had
before
and it was a conversation about our
bodies and it was joyous and it was full
of laughter
and it was instead of all the things
that we wanted to change
and we knew that we had something
special and so as lizzy and rachel got
out of the car that night
and left me in the middle like an unset
jelly pouring from a mold
i was filled with a promise that there
was a show to be made
so from that beachbody ready was born
and you just saw the first 40 seconds of
our show
i’m rachel this is shauna lizzie
sarah and jess and we are the roaring
girls
a whole-based theater company that
exists to make work that is fierce
feminist and fun we use our
autobiographical narratives to make work
in order for other people not to feel
quite so alone in the world
we created our last show beachbody ready
to talk about the images that we see in
the media
and how it feels when you don’t look
like the people that you see in
magazines
on tv on your social media timelines
we wanted to create a show that stuck
two fingers up to everything the media
ever said you should look like
lizzy and i graduated from the
university of hull
with our master’s degrees in hand and
started making shows
for a local theatre festival which were
very short performances
and we didn’t realize that a couple
years later we would be surrounded by a
group of incredible people
and we’d be about to embark on our first
national tour
so how do you make a show like beachbody
ready
well it started as we often do by just
having a chat
and we talked and we talked and we
talked some more
all about everything we hated about our
bodies everything we loved
we talked about the beauty industry and
about the things that people had said to
us that stuck with us
and the things that we wish they’d said
instead we told stories we played games
we wrote a lot of lists
we unrolled big pieces of paper filled
them with ideas we covered the walls in
post-it notes
and we laughed until it hurt and then we
cried
a lot because we were putting a voice to
something that we’d never shared before
and then just to balance it out we had a
dance to some lizzo which i can
highly recommend 100 but really the
process was all about
finding our people we worked with an
amazing writer called lydia
lydia merchant who helped us who helped
provide some structure to help
us make sense of everything we were
saying we knew that we wanted to work
with people who were passionate who were
supportive
and people who understood how important
it was to get this right how important
it was to work in a way that was safe in
a way that was kind
and so we made sure that anything that
anyone shared in our room
while it might be questioned and it
might be disagreed with would never be
dismissed
and would never be shared outside that
room without permission
and it is an absolute point of pride to
work with people for whom the well-being
of our team is not merely an
afterthought
so standing here now it is incredible to
look back at how we actually got here
um so when we first did the show we had
no idea
how it was going to go down in front of
an actual paying audience
so on our opening night us three were
waiting backstage
and we were listening to our rowdy
sold-out whole audience entering the
theatre
and i have never felt so sick in my
entire life
i was questioning every decision that
brought me to that point
i looked across to rachel who was just
staring in horror at the wall
uh and i looked across to sarah who had
gone a lovely clammy shade of grey
and looked like she was about to throw
up and we kept asking ourselves and each
other why have we decided to do this
what
what were we thinking is this just pure
self-indulgence what if people don’t
laugh
what if people get up and leave halfway
through we were imagining the worst
basically
nothing could have prepared us for the
response that we got
i had spent months before the first show
preparing myself
for what the audience reaction might be
when i walked out in my swimwear for the
first time on the stage
and i had prepared myself for the
silence
i prepared myself for the groans
prepared myself
for people to avert their gaze but what
i did
not prepare myself for was the raucous
and celebratory cheer that filled the
room
and nobody was sick and nobody laughed
at my belly so that was nice
we were met with such warmth we had
whoops and cheers
and claps at the minute we walked out on
stage it had all been worth it
yeah well i my relationship with my body
has come a long way in three years
and in 2017 in this show here i wore a
swim dress
and it was because the thought of
unveiling my thighs and my stomach
filled me with the most anxious fear and
now
if they had have let me i would have
done this entire talk wearing nothing
but a smile honestly
what is so scary about imperfection
and it hasn’t been the easiest process
for us
online uh some of our advertisements for
beachbodyready were met with a negative
backlash
words like fat disgusting
you are taking beds from cancer patients
and that is something that somebody
actually said
for me and rachel having the audacity to
be fat and wear a swimming castle online
and it was harsh and it was biting
but we clap back with gifts
of fat women dancing and babies wobbling
their bellies
and the words of women far more
articulate than we could ever be
our bodies are not an apology at the
roaring girls
what we always say is that we like
making work with our friends
and as we often talk about things which
are really personal and difficult
it’s great to be in a room where you
know you’re being supported with
kindness
but although we love to make work with
our friends sometimes it is difficult
um often we take things a little bit too
personally
um we find it a little bit easier to get
annoyed or irritated by each other
um but i think the most kind of the
biggest struggle that we have is finding
time to be friends with each other
and whenever we find the space to be
friends it’s always filled with talks of
the work
stuff as well but working with like
working with friends is the greatest
honor the level of well-being and
support increases and well-being is at
the very core of our company
and we always try to provide counselling
sessions whenever we’re working on
projects
to help talk about the difficult
subjects and we’re always there to look
after each other
build each other up and make sure that
we’re all happy and healthy
working this way is essential for us
without putting our well-being at the
forefront of what we do
beachbody ready certainly wouldn’t be
where it is today because it hasn’t
always been easy
uh when we applied for funding the first
time round we were unfortunately
unsuccessful which felt like a bit of a
blur and a bit of a setback
but we were determined and we really
believed in this little nugget of an
idea that we had
and we’d already programmed the show to
be on a whole truck a few months later
so we decided to do it anyway we didn’t
need the money it was fine
but we we scraped enough money together
to pay ourselves 100 pounds each
for six weeks work because we wanted to
be able to pay ourselves something
um and this meant that we had to balance
our day jobs alongside making a show
which was exhausting it meant that a lot
of us were juggling up to three or four
jobs at once
so when we got to rehearsals we would
often be quite ratty with each other
but we were really passionate about this
project and we wanted to put everything
into it
but when you are talking about such raw
and personal and emotional things at the
end of a very long day
naturally there are tensions and tears
and frustrations
now the show beachbody ready for me is
an absolute joy to be a part of
there are still three years on every
single performance these women make me
cry with laughter
because who knows what’s going to come
out of their mouths honestly
but it is also a really emotionally
draining shirt as i said we talk about a
lot of personal things
and there are some moments in the show
three years on i still find difficult to
talk about
but there is always a friend next to me
on stage to pass me a biscuit
or to give my hand a little squeeze and
it’s this support network that
we’ve built up that shawna talked about
which has got us through the not so nice
bits
now in order to make the show we went on
a tour of the north
visiting different theatres as a team
talking and rehearsing in each city
we were invited to talk to a room full
of producers
who represented theaters across the
north of england
we turned up and we listened intently to
all of these incredible
eloquent pieces of work that were
happening across
the north and then we turned up
and we bowled onto stage and we started
doing
a part of our performance and you really
have not known awkward
until you have danced in front of a load
of people
in your swimwear on a thursday afternoon
and it is a room full of people who can
make or break your career
luckily for us that afternoon was
pivotal
to the creation of the show and the tool
that we did to manage to secure us some
partnerships and some funding
and that was crucial in us being able to
expand our network to find new
collaborators to work with and new
supporters
but also crucially to be able to engage
with our audiences
with the women for whom this show was
made and so we went out into the
community and we spoke to them and we
listened to their experiences
and it led us to staunch supporters like
disability blogger accessible rach and
absolutely inspirational babes like the
shi
siders a t-side based girl gang who
tackle isolation
through friendship and really inspired
us to be more positive
and we wanted to involve their voices in
the project so we created a zine
a companion piece to the theater show
something tactile
to take home and remind you to keep
talking we filled it with art with
poetry with articles
all commissioned from the people that we
we’d spoken to
and we gave a free copy to everyone who
came to see our show
in edinburgh and that was the next step
of the journey
we did 25 shows in 26 days
at the edinburgh festival fringe and i’m
still having flashbacks
it is intense it is stressful and it is
exhausting everywhere in edinburgh is up
a hill
and we walked for miles and we built and
took down a set every day
and uh worst of all we spent a small
fortune on a pint every evening
but it was the most wonderful experience
we had
wonderful venue staff really vibrant
loud responsive audiences
and we got to see so many shows and
connect to other people who are making
work about their bodies
it was great it wasn’t all smooth
sailing there was a
fateful night where these two shared a
bed and woke up with a thud as the frame
collapsed beneath them
we slept in the kitchen on for like
three days
it was great there were so many
successes that we can’t count them all
five star reviews being a recommended
show
from the guardian and the british
council
and the things that we could never
foresee like the day
that i got a text from an old school
friend asking me if it was my show in an
article
on the front page of the bbc news app
and it was
following on from edinburgh we have
achieved things that we definitely
wouldn’t have been able to achieve if we
didn’t go
being at the end of the line and hull
means it’s a real struggle to get people
from outside of the city to come and see
our work
and so edinburgh was the perfect
platform for us to share our message
with the world
since then we have booked a 50-date tour
in 39 arts venues across england and
wales
we have fantastic support from
organizations who have helped us
in to help introduce us to new and
exciting venues and audiences
so we can share our work with them as
well and we have set up our first board
of trustees
as we move forward with our company
development and it is filled with
amazing people from all corners of the
country
and all with very different exciting
skills now the most wonderful thing
that’s come out of this entire
experience for all of us
has been our audience responses um
usually at the end of the show we like
to hang back
usually in the bar preferably in the bar
so that our audiences can come and chat
to us if they feel like they’d like to
and we have had people come running up
to us and and hug
us and cry with us and share stories and
thank us
and if they haven’t been able to
identify with one of our stories
personally
they know someone who has maybe gone
through something similar and these
personal connections that we’ve made
with people have just been so magic
there was one audience member who
tweeted us that she uh during a
particularly sad bit of the show
she started to cry and this uh lady next
to her
just reached out and held her hand for a
little bit and
they these were two turtle strangers
just comforting each other
and we were actually able to introduce
them officially over twitter
and they ended up going for a coffee
together which we thought was really
lovely yeah and the online responses to
our show
um have been overwhelmingly positive
people leave us messages all the time
like this
um telling us how they understood
they resonated they saw part of
themselves in us
and occasionally our instagram will get
a picture
sent from somebody in a bikini and it
says
uh i am not ready to share my body with
the world
but i do want to share it with the
roaring girls
we tell our stories in the hope that our
audiences will share theirs
and one sticks out for us it was a woman
called hannah
who came to see the show and wanted to
take a little bit of beachbody ready
with her
and she knew that it was important to
empower and celebrate other women
she was on a night out she was in the
ladies toilets and she saw a woman with
the most beautiful tattoos
and she said to her look i’ve just been
to see this show and it tells me that i
need to celebrate other women and tell
them when they look great
and i love your tattoos and that woman
replied
did you go see beachbody ready paul’s a
village
it is it is it’s not that impressive
it’s
hannah has now come from being an
audience member to
a person who’s on our board of trustees
so we encourage you
to find your people to be more open
and supportive and if someone looks good
you better tell them
because those moments of connection
encouraging
people to be a little bit bolder and a
whole lot kinder
is exactly what our theatre is about
thank you
you