A huge congratulations to Amy Lynne Westray who is this year's recipient of the Buzz Goodbody Director Award. Amy brought their wonderful production of 'T(EA)-BOY' to the festival this year - a one-person show, Amy wrote, performed in, and directed.
"T(EA) - BOY is a genre and gender bending poetic mashup of physical theatre, clowning and cabaret. Using distortion through movement, lip sync, projection and audience participation. You are the tea bag in my cup, let me bathe you in queer and trans voices. There is room for joy and grief; we exist in multitudes. Consider this your invitation to my T- Party."
The show title is a play on T-boy as a kind of "failed" one. The show questions new binaries, gender roles and beauty standards within the queer community, inviting a redefinition of what femininity and masculinity can look like. Staging euphoria, dysphoria and the lifesaving effect of community. I ask, am I trans enough? And who are we asking? It celebrates leaning into softness, loving loudly and harnessing anger. The show highlights the close relationship to death many queer people grow up with and whilst platforming queer joy gives space for grief we experience individually and collectively. Exploring then what it means to age as a trans person. How I will attend a hundred births of myself, becoming more and more at home in this body all whilst getting closer to death and for the first time in my life feeling terrified of it. I have never had more life to live.
Comments from our judges:
“An artist/director dealing with a currently ever-present subject but with a rare gift for generous use of the personal and beautifully engaging“
"Extremely heartfelt and vulnerable story, I really loved this. Amy did an incredible job with this piece. This is the one I will keep with me for a long time. Loved how it intersected a variety of story-telling techniques: verbatim & clowning, musical numbers. Think this is a really important story and a very brave one to be told, directed and performed by Amy."
We are thrilled to be able to award Amy with a £1,000 grant to be used to develop their practice, knowledge, experience and appreciation of theatre and drama, and they will be offered ongoing mentorship from NSDF to help this production get the space, resource and opportunity it deserves over the next year.
NSDF is ever grateful to Director Mark Hawes and all at the Royal theatrical Support Trust (RTST) for their kind and vital support of NSDF and the young artists we work with.
The Grant memorialises Mary Ann – nick-named "Buzz" – Goodbody. Buzz was the celebrated first female director of the RSC and the driving force behind the establishment of its studio theatre, The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the early 1970s, which later spawned the Warehouse in London: aka the Donmar today. Buzz died tragically in 1975, aged 28.
