We are raising money for VESSEL, a new play by Grace Olusola which is touring the UK this summer, including the Edinburgh and Camden Fringe!
After a workshopped performance at Posifest, Edinburgh's annual positive psychology festival, and a sold out run at Oxford's Old Fire Station, VESSEL is touring the UK this August as the Oxford University Drama Society's selected National Tour.
With your help, VESSEL will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Camden Fringe, and in Nottingham. We’re asking for your support through crowdfunding not only to fund this exciting production, but so that the company’s travel and accommodation can be covered, removing financial access barriers for our company members. Dawn Productions is a student theatre company, prioritising access to theatre and community outreach. Dawn is pledging 10% of the profits from the VESSEL tour to BEAT, the UK’s leading eating disorder charity.
So what is VESSEL?
VESSEL is a new, quasi-verbatim anthology by Grace Olusola that tackles our increased, post-lockdown awareness of food and body image issues. Shortlisted for the OUDS New Writing festival 2023, this imaginative ensemble piece is based on 128 confessional responses that came from a survey that was circulated in 2021, asking people how they felt about food and their bodies. The play explores several 'episodes', devised and inspired by the survey responses as well as the company's personal experiences, utilising movement, song and a distinctive theatrical style to put real stories side by side. These include themes on fatphobia, pregnancy, racialised body image and more. VESSEL seeks to contribute to our national conversations around health, fatness, food insecurity, beauty standards and disordered eating to remind us all that when it comes to food and our bodies, it is never as simple as we think.
VESSEL has always been emphatically about community. The idea for the play came in the summer of 2021, after seeing the negative impact of national lockdown number three on people’s food relationships. Our writer, Grace, quickly learned that everyone has a relationship with food, and sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes it’s really not. VESSEL means to explore this sliding scale, because once we all realise that these relationships exist, we can be more compassionate for those with negative relationships. This is especially important as nationally, we are working towards more empathetic and informed discourse in the media we produce and in our healthcare system.
This project successfully funded on 25th August 2023