Jacqueline Genie is a writer, performer and director. She started her career in theatre, writing/performing the critically acclaimed one woman shows Madwoman In The Attic (Riverside Studios) and Melodrama For Woman and Fridge (Edinburgh Fringe, winner of The Herald newspaper award) and writing / directing vaudeville musical Catwoman Colette. She was shortlisted for The Stage Award for Acting Excellence, worked extensively with Ken Campbell, playing leads in Pidgin Makbed and 24 hour cult epic The Warp, appeared in legendary sketch show Newsrevue and improvised comedy at The Gilded Balloon.She has an MA in Scriptwriting, with commissions including The Glastonbury Grail, The Sacred Quest, spec TV comedy drama The Circle, shortlisted BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum, and God’s Gift, selected for Cascade Media’s Writer’s Couch. She wrote/directed Ex, and Do You Come Here Often?, a comic documentary about reincarnation.
All posts by Megan
Tom Baker
Tom Baker is a long standing Dischordian Pope, and SubGenius Minister (Rev Dr Tommy Squeezebox) He is is a London-based all round performer splitting his energies between cabaret (It’s YOUR Funeral, the Double R Club, The Black Cat Cabaret), music (deranged accordion-toting frontman of The Bohemianauts) and occasional forays into the world of theatre (most notably, in this context, The Warp, The Southwark Mysteries and The Cosmic Trigger Play). He is almost sure that he’s not just a brain in a jar somewhere, but remains open to the possibility that everything he knows is wrong.
Katy-Anne Bellis
Katy-Anne Bellis is a regular performer and artist on the Liverpool arts scene. She trained at Hope street ltd where she developed a passion for puppetry and street theatre. At Manchester metropolitan university she got a taste for creating radical and anarchic performances in unusual spaces and went on to form the company Caustic widows. She has toured nationally and internationally as a street theatre artist, cabaret performer and actress with companies including Whalley Range All stars, Headstrung, And Now, Proper Job Theatre and the Lantern company. In February 2014 she met Daisy and became a fully fledged company member of the Cosmic Trigger Play.
Moksha Poetess
Michelle Watson aka Moksha Poetess has worked as an actress with The Natural Theatre Company, in Ken Campbell’s, “The Warp” and as John Constables Goose in “The Southwark Mysteries”, which performed in venues including Shakespeare’s Globe. She then shifted her attention to writing, becoming Moksha, a respected spoken word artist on the London and festival circuit. She also writes issue based plays for teenagers, which are performed by actors throughout the UK. For many years she produced her own successful “It’s a Thought Crime Cabaret” events at the 491 Gallery and other London venues and has worked side by side with Daisy Campbell on a number of projects, not least the Cosmic Trigger play, which she co-produced. She also Directed the Find the Others Festival, which ran along side the play. Her trigger well and truly pulled.
Claudia Egypt Boulton
Claudia Egypt Boulton is 40 years a theatre maker; a true mind fuck operative with an incredible lineage of evolutionary theatre. Her professional debut was with the delightfully whacky Phantom Captain. She became a Founder member of Beryl and the Perils – Fast Furious Feminist Fun in the 70’s/80’s. Warped seriously first time around, ICA/ Edinburgh at the Regency Cinema. 79-80 with Ken Campbell; Warped again second generation with Ken and Daisy Eris Campbell. Actor/Managed that beast for 2 years at the Drome 1999-2001. Guest directed at the painter Symon’s, Space Island Light Industrial Theatre in Bali – an amphitheatre designed by Buckminster Fuller. Toured in the role of the `Serpent in Peter Greenaway’s prop Opera. ‘100 Objects to Represent the World.’ Directed Robert Anton Wilson’s, Wilhelm Reich In Hell, in the 80’s at the October Gallery London as well as “Deconstruction of Countdown” – based on William Burrough’s Naked Lunch for Studio 7. AND she not only co-produced the Cosmic Trigger play, she also played Eris herself.
Bang Crosby
Bang Crosby is a punk trickster and clown, exploiting archetypal and elemental energies to create cabaret from chaos. His work is heavily influenced by vodou and chaos magick, creating a hilarious tapestry of light, sound, sex, and death, framed within the cosmology of the fool.
A very special contribution from Alan Moore
So here’s another big one you lucky people. Drum roll please…
Mr Alan Moore. That’s right THE Alan Moore! Writer, mage and counter culture aficionado. The term genius is often bandied around but here at Festival 23 we feel it’s an apt appellation for the man frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history. His work in the 80s on works such as the ‘Watchmen’ series and ‘V for Vendetta’ made an entire industry shift focus, causing publishers to target comics at adults as well as kids. Always demonstrating the highest integrity, and firmly embedded in the underground, when wider audiences picked up his writing he edged away from the mainstream, developing such an aversion to corporate America that he has since declined large payments for Hollywood adaptations of his work.
Alongside writing, Alan is an occultist, ceremonial magician and anarchist, and these themes feature in such works as ‘Promethea’, ‘From Hell’, and most recently his Lovecraft inspired ‘Neonomicon’. Alan’s work outside the comic world includes novels (Alan is currently finishing the million word novel ‘Jerusalem’) performing avant-garde spoken word occult “workings” and writing scripts including ‘Show Pieces’, a short film series directed by Mitch Jenkins.
His personal take on art as magic, his concept of ideas space and his passion for speaking his mind mean it’s always a joy to hear his take on the world. Alan is recording an exclusive interview for Festival 23, which will be aired on the weekend. We’re so pleased to have his patronage and can’t wait to hear what he has to say.
Mr Vast and the Vast Minority
“Jesus, you’re not easy to describe, you know? Okay, let me think.. You’re like a Muppet version of a Philip K. Dick novel… A Mr Vast gig is similar to that moment when you realise you’ve been secretly filmed by Derren Brown for the last six weeks…One of my mates thought you were well dodgy while the other insisted on paying you double for your CD!? How’s that?” John Higgs.
“He’s a preacher, a screecher, an Archie Leacher An artless dodger, a limelight hogger, a dead horse flogger. He‘s the genial game-show host whose mind is toast. The quiz-master with all the wrong answers. The life coach on the National Express. The high-street shaman in the sequinned dress. This is his sweat lodge seminar, his powerpoint aberration, the shotgun in his shell suit, the seamonkey on his back A burnt-out, blurted-out, beercan-touting carry-out cabaret.”
Henry Sargeant trained as an actor and “dark clown” before veering off into music as frontman of the legendary Wevie Stonder, dubbed by the BBC as ‘the Monty Python of electronic music’ They went on to record 5 albums and two Maida Vale sessions. Mr Vast is his solo project and without the band he has heightened the theatrical/comedy elements to new bewilderingly ecstatic levels.
Jezebel Halewood-Leagas
Jezebel Halewood-Leagas has worked as an accomplished artist and prop maker for many theatre productions in Liverpool. She made many of the props for Daisy Eris Campbell’s Cosmic Trigger in 2014, including the gate to Chapel Perilous.
Matt Smart
Matt Smart is an artist and sculptor experienced at producing high quality, large scale outside works. Shows include a solo show at The Turrill Sculpture Garden, and he has previously exhibited at Supernormal Festival. Through his work he explores notions on sustainability, and social treatment of tribes, diasporas and gender. He established and ran a South London gallery, exhibiting group and solo shows of artists with clinically diagnosed psychiatric conditions.
Not only will Matt be bringing his installation work to Festival 23, he will also be giving a talk in the 3rd Eye space callled “Dig up a lost princess to make sculptures with molehills”!