“It’s a funny, feisty cabaret,” is how Newport performer Donna Jackson described her new show premiering at Kindered Bandroom in Yarraville on Friday, November 15.
With a name like ‘Art Accidents and Underpants’ it seems a pretty apt description and even more so given the content.
“It’s me telling a story about all girl bands in the 1980’s and it’s about an incident where I got caught driving around with lots of girls in a car and got taken to the police station and wouldn’t tell them my name so there was a strip search involving rubber gloves,” said Jackson of the show which fortunately focuses less on all rubber gloves and more on all girl bands.
“If we don’t tell our stories how will the next generation know there was a time in the 1980’s when women picked up guitars and set up dance parties all over Melbourne and across Australia,” she said of her motivation for writing the show.
Jackson’s band, Nice Girls Don’t Spit, were so in vogue at the time they were able to fly around Australia performing to huge crowds of dancing women.
However, rather than a nostalgia trip, Jackson said the show was a celebration of a feminist movement which she recalled as ‘trying to change the world’ while dancing, singing and driving fast at the same time.
Each scene of Art Accidents and Underpants covers one of these themes in what Jackosn described as a “fast moving storytelling musical slam.”
After three performances in Yarraville on November 15, 23 and 30, Jackson hopes to go back to her rock band roots and take the show around Australia.
Bookings: kinderedbanroom.com.au
Cade Lucas
