Local drag act debuts family- friendly queer shows

Adam Carver, aka Birmingham drag act Fatt Butcher, is a creative producer and theatre maker. They are also the artistic director of the newly launched Fatt Projects and its first project is Big Fatt, which is a programme of queer-positive, family-friendly performances starting with the pioneering PALAVER!.

Fatt Projects said: “PALAVER! will create a disruptive, messy, joyful, and celebratory season of inclusive performance programming for children aged three to eight and family audiences, supporting the development of high quality performance that provides essential representation, space, and dialogue celebrating queer identities for children and families.”

PALAVER! will combine three strands of activity, first: “Delivering a series of three facilitated artist-development labs at Cambridge exploring the radical potential of queer work for young audiences through up-skilling and empowering six of the UK’s leading queer artists to start developing new performance work.”

These development labs will “include producer support, production and development resources, and test performance opportunities. Each lab will be followed by additional development time, culminating in the creation of six performance extracts ready for development into full-scale productions”.

The second strand of PALAVER!’s objective is the audience-focused one that offers the public a programme of family-friendly queer performances that will take place at Cambridge Junction this month.

There will be three Sunday morning PALAVER! parties on October 3 and October 17, “bringing together disco, drag, dress-up, games, and scratch performances of work created on development labs.”

This part of the project will then culminate in the PALAVER! Festival that takes place during half-term on Thursday, October 28. This will be “a day-long celebration of inclusive programming celebrating the potential of queer positive performance work, including a showcase of the six new performance works developed over the project”.

The final strand of PALAVER! is to invite producers, programmers, artistic directors, venue managers, artists and independent creatives to the PALAVER! Symposium on Wednesday, October 27. This is “a day-long event of interactive workshops, panel discussions, LGBTQ+ awareness training, and open conversations on artist development, emotional labour, marketing, and venue accessibility.”

PALAVER! is supported by Cambridge Junction through its Vision Mixer’s programme, Marlborough Productions, and Arts Council England.

Tickets for all the events are on sale now from www.junction.co.uk or contact hello@fattprojects.org for more info.