Focus: The Good Name Cabaret

Who are you, and where are you from?
We are an anarchic clown and bouffon collective based in the North East of England (with some tendencies to wander off), including:
Alanna Wilson 
Rosa Stourac-McCreery 
Adam Wilson-Holmes 
Jack Wilson-Craw
Shevek 
August 
Val Ross 

What is it you do?
We’re a collective of people who do various things: live, breathe, travel, eat Percy Pigs, juggle, make art, and are involved in Theatre of the Oppressed work, clown activism, acting, and comedy. 

Our common theme is, of course, our love for all things playful, stupid and clowny!

How long have you been doing it?
The Good Name Cabaret was created early in the year during a clown and bouffon workshop hosted by Alanna, where she pulled together all the best clowns of the North East.* 

The group includes a wide mixture of people new and familiar with clown, including those just coming to terms with and accepting their clown behaviour to those who have been professionally stupid for many years. Either way, in our eyes, everyone is a clown. 

The exciting part of our collective is that we’re bringing together people with different humour, life-experience and performance skills to form a hilarious immersive show for our audiences.

What inspires you?
Our group is inspired by so many different things it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where our inspiration comes from. But, we’re inspired, compelled rather, to be cheeky, playful and give audiences space to question why they find what they find funny. We all come to clowning from different backgrounds ranging from performers, stand-ups, she-wolfs, and comedic writers, to multidisciplinary artists. 

What we love about clowning is that we can be weird, playful, and expressive and provide comedy in less than an ordinary way. 

Tell us about your music.
Our work is sometimes grotesque, often beautiful, definitely surreal and occasionally wholesome; during our cabaret, we invite the audience to be entertained, laugh and cry. 

We explore wholesome silliness, invoke wolk spirits, Australians, sexuality, toxic masculinity, our inner child and more! 

We’d also describe ourselves as political, but in a cute way 😘 Socio-political issues are posed in a fun and non-divisive way, so come and join the exploration and have a good time with The Good Name Cabaret! 

What have you got coming up in the future?
After the Newcastle Fringe Festival, we’re hosting our extended extra experimental cabaret on the 12th of August at The Central Bar Gateshead – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-good-name-cabaret-summer-special-tickets-665167532997 

Where can people find out more about you?
Updates on our silliness can be found on Instagram – @thegoodnamecabaret