In 2019 when Friendly Feminism was first performed, little did Millicent Sarre know it would open the door to an exciting career in cabaret. Millicent’s award-winning show Friendly Feminism will be making its long-awaited return to the Glenelg Winter Arts Festival this week.
Friendly Feminism gives the audience a crash course in many of the key tenets that make up the feminist movement in the 21st Century: namely enthusiastic consent, toxic masculinity and rape culture. The show features an original score, composed by Millicent. Friendly Feminism will be appearing as part of the massive line up at the Glenelg Winter Arts Festival between 9th and 14th July, 2024.
Glam Adelaide spoke to Millicent in the lead up to the Glenelg Winter Arts Festival and we asked her if she caught a glimpse of where this might end up when first premiering Friendly Feminism.
“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, but it’s become my life now, which is very exciting. I don’t think I would have believed you if you told me five years ago that this was going to be my full time job now, which is very cool. I think the winning formula that I stumbled upon is I just want to do something that matters to me, that I’m passionate about, and audiences can sense that. Audiences have a pretty good BS radar. If you’re being authentic and you’re doing something that’s being really true to you, then audiences will connect to you. People love seeing people doing what they love.”
Earlier this year, Millicent, along with Jemma Allen and Rosie Russell, wrote and performed a sell-out Adelaide Fringe season of their hit show Bisexual Intellectual. This show saw them win a Fringe award to tour the show to the Melbourne Fringe later this year.
“It’s very exciting, especially because of the strength and visibility of the queer community in Victoria and in Melbourne specifically. This is a show I created with my best friends and we thought it was really fun and we had a great time creating and performing it – it appealed to our sensibilities and our wacky sense of humour. Because we were just being very authentic, I think that was what audiences liked about it and what I hope Melbourne audiences will like about it as well.”
For this return season of Friendly Feminism, Millicent will be joined by her two dear friends, Jemma Allen and Nikki Long.
“I suppose that’s one of the delightful things about producing and performing my own work is I get to work with my best friends – It’s great and a lot of fun!”
Millicent explained to us how she has been working with Jemma and Nikki to update the show since it was first staged in 2019.
“There are some references that are being updated because of where our topics of conversation, our cultural zeitgeist and where the progressive feminist movement is sitting at the moment. That is obviously an ever changing beast. So the material in the show is adaptive and responsive to that. We’ve had a really fun time this week going through everything and how we are going to update things. What’s the current reference that is going to be appropriate to put in here? We’ve also reworked some of the material to not only present the same, like themes and points of view that the show always has, but to also have a bit of a retrospective in there as well. Like talking about how when I wrote this, this is what I was thinking, but I’m not necessarily sure that I agree with that anymore – that sort of thing. These particular conversations have only strengthened with time. So it’s nice to be able to present some writing commentary, I suppose – think of this as the director’s cut commentary version.”
Friendly Feminism
The Kingfisher at Glenelg Winter Arts Festival
9th July – 14th July. See website for session times
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/friendly-feminism-gwaf24
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