HONEYBEELUJAH! Comes to Edinburgh Forest Fringe, Aug 16-17

Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping/Colchester Arts Centre/Escalator East To Edinburgh present: HONEYBEELUJAH! New York's favourite radical makes Edinburgh debut with their very special mixture of passion and politics and a celebration of International Honeybee Day, Forest Fringe, 16, 17 August 21.15 (70 mins).

Hallelujah! Your saviour is at hand. If you feel we're suffering from shopping overload, if you're concerned about a world rife with global advertising, multinational control, climate change, packaging, supermarket domination, TV merchandising and all the rampant free marketeering in a profit driven wicked and dirty world... help is here my friends.

These notorious campaigning troublemakers, who have been arrested more than 50 times, come on a crusade to help the Honeybee, threatened by deadly nerve agents and big business agriculture. Honeybeelujah! promises humour, great music and an unsettling challenge to the soul.

To date they have performed in, and Billy has exorcised cash registers in, over a dozen countries. Reverend Billy and his magnificent Stop Shopping Choir will sing, preach, charm, berate, seduce and rescue at their first appearance in the Scottish capital.

August 16th is International Honeybee day. Thousands of activists and bee lovers will press for a moratorium and ban on neonicitinoid pesticides which are proven to be the major cause of Colony Collapse and the extreme decline of bees worldwide. It is believed that highly secretive Monsanto (manufacturers of neonicitinoid pesticides) CEO Hugh Grant lives in Scotland at least part of the year.

This secular 'post-religious' church joins a worldwide protest movement already in motion. Rev Billy explains, 'Protests against the killers of our crucial pollinating collaborators are everywhere, including 10 Downing Street. Yet the effort to save the honeybee is weak enough for multinationals like Monsanto (who claim sustainability for their products), Bayer and Syngenta to continue to deny the science that makes it clear just how deadly their neonicitinoid pesticides are.'

Reverend Billy Talen is an actor, performance artist and activist who began his experimental preaching in Times Square in 1994. Soon singers were accompanying his 'retail Interventions' inside chain stores, principal targets being Disney, GAP, Nike, and Starbucks. He is legally banned from every branch of Starbucks in the USA and the coffee giant has issued a memo to its managers 'What should I do if Reverend Billy is in my store?'

The Church of Stop Shopping hold 'services' wherever they can, in theatres, churches, community centres, forests, parking lots, shopping malls, and perhaps most importantly, inside stores, as close to the cash register as they can get, within spitting distance of the point of purchase. Their feature film 'What Would Jesus Buy' was produced by Morgan Spurlock and their earlier film Preacher With an Unknown God won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Get ready to swarm! Honeybeelujah! Is produced by Colchester Arts Centre as part of Escalator East To Edinburgh which helps artists and arts organisations to raise their profile and perform to new audiences as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Honeybeelujah!
Out of the Blue, Drill Hall, 36 Dalmeny St, Edinburgh EH6 8RG
16 and 17 August
Time: 21.15 (70 mins)
FREE admission
www.revbilly.com

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