Camden People's Theatre Presents COME AS YOU ARE Tour

In 2017, Camden People's Theatre staged Come As You Are, a festival celebrating trans, non-binary and gender-queer identities: this year, for the first time ever, CPT will tour a host of artists, including some of the festival highlights, to venues across the UK with shows that explode and explore ideas around gender and sexuality, searching the rubble for answers, and passing the mic to the lesser heard voices of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Each festival will be headlined by the award-winning show BULLISH, created by the team behind the smash hit Joan, alongside two other performances. Come As You Are hopes to build lasting relationships between the venues and their local LGBTQIA+ community through accompanying activity including a scratch night featuring local LGBTQIA+ artists and a panel discussion featuring local queer influencers. In the week leading up to the festival, a BULLISH photography exhibition will be installed in each venue, and each show will be captioned by the Difference Engine, which sends captions to audience member's mobile phones or tablets.

Festival headliner BULLISH is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur re-molded and transformed by Milk Presents. A gender fierce ensemble of hopers and renegades pass, pack and blag their way out of the Labyrinth, re-defining the myths that shape our identity. The Minotaur, a creature who is half-man and half-bull, lives alone within a complex and cavernous Labyrinth. Feared by society they are used as a threat against the enemies of Crete and are left to their solitary existence. That is until Theseus arrives, a young warrior set on killing the minotaur at all costs. A tale of treachery, power and love, hell bent on not taming the minotaur within.

Other performances include Non-Binary Electro Hour by Ray Filar, a tale of gender fluidity and desire told in electro-punk form with songs, sci-fi, strip-tease and spoken word. This show brings together noise about queer life with a brief punk history of drag outside the boxes - from male impersonators of the music hall era to the gender-bending icons of today. In Bound, Lucy Hutson will be asking about the slippery nature of identity: the ones you give yourself, the ones forces onto you and the ones you cling onto, and in Too Pretty to Punch Edalia Day grapples what it means to be human when you don't fit into any of the boxes.

As part of a double bill, I'm Bitter About Glitter is a collaboration between mother and child. Liz Clarke has worked with her nine-year-old son Felix to create a story full of grit and sparkle, a gentle exploration of how gender affects the choices we're given and the roles we can play. The other half of the double bill will be Deuce by Tom Marshman and Rachael Miles, who grew up in the grip of clause 28 which banned local authorities from 'promoting' homosexuality. Using pop references to unpick historical representations of queer non-conformity, Deuce is an unpacking of female masculinities and male femininities.

The tour visits five venues in areas with high LGBTQI+ populations, who are committed to developing their relationship with LGBTQIA+ artists and audiences.

Brian Logan, Artistic Director of Camden People's Theatre, said "We couldn't be more excited to be taking the 'Come As You Are' show on the road. The 2017 festival was a huge hit at CPT. It drew - and delighted - a highly diverse crowd, brought some cracking performances to the stage, sparked fascinating conversations - and taught us a lot about gender positivity. We're grateful to have the chance to share that learning, and several of those electrifying shows. The 'CAYA' tour also realises an ambition for CPT to make our themed festivals - so well loved by London audiences - available to theatregoers around the country. We can't wait to work with the artists, our partner venues and local audiences to make the travelling 'Come As You Are' roadshow a resounding success."

Camden People's Theatre is a central London space dedicated year-round to supporting early-career artists - particularly those making work about issues that matter to people right now. Its mission is to refresh and strengthen the performance sector with a new generation of artists who bring a fresh perspective to contemporary concerns, and create new artistic forms with which to address them; and to present their work to a new generation of audiences. CPT regularly stages festivals of adventurous theatre exploring contemporary social, political and cultural issues. Recent examples include: Common People, on working class experience (2018), Hotbed: A Festival of Sex (2017) and Whose London is it Anyway? on the housing crisis (2016)

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