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‘The thing about Rachel showing up at a venue’ - I say, unfiltered, as I think out loud with Jenna, legend of creative engagement at Sheffield Theatres, ‘is that she’s actually really fucking inconvenient’. I catch myself saying something slanderous about my brilliant big sister, and wonder if I’ve done a foot in mouth moment. I go on anyway.
‘I mean inconvenient in that, everyone has to know about it. She’s like a celebrity, with a huge bloody entourage, and everyone in your building will know she’s here - and they’ll know it’s her, of course, because her face is all over the posters. And because she will tell you’.
I explain how we share a one pager with absolutely every venue staff member when we tour Perfect Show anywhere. We ask everyone to read it. And it’s not just an access rider, though there are bits and pieces in it which help everyone welcome Rachel as a Learning Disabled artist. She doesn’t love loud, unexpected noises. She needs accessible toilets. Functional, access rider type things.
But it’s also a warm welcome to engage with Rachel as a person and an artist who loves a chat. It’s got a cheat sheet for Rachel’s favourite topics, in case you fancy offering up more than the traditional ‘hello, how are you’ (although this classic line does also tend to be a hit with Rachel). It explains how she likes fart jokes, or Kylie Minogue, or jokes about not being allowed to wave at boys (if you are a boy, you’ll quickly see that Rachel is going to ignore that rule completely - she’s a flirt).
We really notice that staff at the buildings we visit want to read it, they want to connect once they’re given some tools for doing that. People tend to enjoy striking up a chat with the enigmatic lead artist of the show that’s currently in the theatre. And Rachel is really funny.
At Barbican, the fantastically creative Stage Door team would swap tips and tricks for making Rachel laugh. Cafe staff would stop her and ask about her show. Technicians would greet her into the venue each afternoon and comfortably be in community with her.
As a lifelong sibling witness to Rachel when she’s out and about in different public spaces, I cannot tell you how different this is to what I am used to. People usually see a visibly learning disabled person and at best they might smile. Usually it’s more flustered and awkward than that. Worse still, active ignoring of her existence. A kid might ask a parent loudly ‘why is that woman in a wheelchair?’, only to be hushed and hurried away.
When I say a show like Perfect Show For Rachel is inconvenient, I don’t mean inconvenient like unwanted. I mean inconvenient like a beautiful intervention in your usual day to day routine. A miniature riot against tradition. A calling in to new ways of chatting, or hanging out, or being creative that Rachel is so up for facilitating if you agree to meet her in her world, instead of asking her to step into yours.
I’ve been ruminating on the term ‘inconvenient’, and it feels really important. We’re currently in deeply collaborative conversations with some beautiful, brilliant venues who want Perfect Show to tour to them. But guess what? It also costs an inconvenient amount of money to tour a show like this. I’m not sure I’d label that ‘beautiful’ as opposed to just ‘reality’. The theatres where conversations will lead to actual tour dates, are the places which are excited by this notion that Rachel might come and disturb the norm, ruffle up routines, and leave the building, the people in it, and the audiences who come fundamentally different to how they arrived. It’s a show that leaves a legacy of change wherever it goes. We hear about it from the people in the venues, months after we have left. I am so proud of that.
We are in a really exciting collaborative stage of dreaming up partnerships with the venues who want this show. We are discussing how to design and co-create audience development and community engagement projects to help deepen and broaden the value and impact of the show, beyond the money it can make per ticket per night.
I wish the state of venue funding was in a different place, where theatres could invest above and beyond what they can make in ticket sales as a standard part of their programming practices. Reality again - that just isn’t where things are at. But I do notice how the value of this show can go beyond that ‘how many tickets can we sell’ mindset, and start to leak into the organisations, communities and spaces we are visiting. In each of the wonderful venues I have just visited to chat about the show, dreaming has been centred - what could a 3 month project with Learning Disabled artists in the building look like before we even get here? Can Zoo Co deliver our innovative Neurodiversity Awareness Training in the building so that all your staff are upskilled at the same time as helping us share the show? Where might Zoo Co and Improbable’s improvisational practice be shared as a tool for social change, or activism, or healing? What does a CPD day for teachers look like? Can we design an accessible club night for after the show? What about an Open Space event?
There is no doubt that this show is an investment in the audiences who come to see it, but beyond that, it is an investment into tangible impact on the culture of a building.
We are now co-designing a really bespoke, 12 month tour period with rich, detailed, specific engagement offers where we hope that the tendrils of Perfect Show can arrive in each community long before the actual cast rocks up, and that they will linger in the atmosphere and fabric of the buildings and communities we visit long after we’ve gone. And where everyone who comes, has a really fucking good night out. With Kylie Minogue drag acts, and WWE scenes, and human ten pin bowling, and Rachel directing Fleur to act loud, quiet and naughty all in the same scene (IYKYK).
I am so excited to meet with programmers, producers, creative engagement teams and ADs who want to dream big with us, rather than trying to pretend this tour can be made ‘smaller’.
We are currently booking our tour for Autumn 2025 - Autumn 2026. We are aiming to build this tour into a big, strategic, nationally-scaled and relevant project so that we can pull on different funding streams to make this happen in a way that meets the reality of the funding landscape and venue’s programming budgets.
So, if you programme a venue, and you’d like to dream big to host our beautifully inconvenient show, please drop me a line on flo@wearezooco.co.uk.
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