"All the weird and wonderful things we could do if public spaces were safe for everyone"

Calico, a dance-theatre company creating movement driven work that “facilitates important social conversations” bring their show Curfew to the Worthing Pier, with Worthing Theatres and Museum, as part of SpinOut22 Festival on June 25 at 6pm and 8pm. They are promising a loud, colourful piece of dance theatre, all about reclaiming public spaces.

Martha Harrison, co-director of Calico, said: “Curfew blends dance, theatre, drag and voice recording to reframe the conversation around sexual harassment in a frightening, funny and hopeful exploration of the curfew invisibly imposed on women and non-binary people.

“It responds to the rise in sexual assault and harassment cases and the outrage that came in response to Baroness Jones’ sarcastic mention of a ‘curfew for men’ in parliament. Curfew is a verbatim performance piece, built around community responses to the question ‘what would you do if men had a curfew?’, including those from domestic abuse charity Safe in Sussex. The performance appeals to adults of all ages and gender and is a curfew-breaking, space-claiming party, celebrating all the weird and wonderful things we could be doing if public spaces were safe for everyone.”

Fellow co-director Daz Scott said “We are excited to be developing our show with Worthing Theatres and Museum. We are so grateful to have worked with members of Safe in Sussex to conduct interviews for Curfew and to be creating this performance about a theme that is so important to the people of Worthing and beyond.”

Curfew was shortlisted for the Pleasance Theatre Reserve 2022 and was also recently performed at Camden People’s Theatre as part of Calm Down, Dear Festival.

Daz added: “Curfew is a 30-minute multi-disciplinary show combining dance, theatre and verbatim voice recording, to explore the Curfew invisibly imposed on women and non-binary people as a result of sexual assault and harassment. It is suitable for adults of all ages and genders. The performance will be outside and free to the public: https://wtm.uk/events/curfew/.

“We have been going for about six months. We are very, very new but we had worked together before. We met at university.

It has been a good start: “We are very lucky. We are from Birmingham and Birmingham has got a good support network for emerging artists. We have had a lot of help from people so it has been good. We have made a better start than we anticipated. We were expecting it to be really challenging and it has been challenging but in a way the pandemic was good for us because we made some digital work and that has really helped us. It has meant that we've got a trailer for Curfew for instance and other digital stuff that we did during the pandemic"