By Jocelyn Affleck.
Suitable for ages 16+.
Fringe Future Winner
The Skin Show, a deeply surreal, tenderly powerful folk-horror séance with dark comedy, drag-ish energy, folklore, and a dead granny. The show blends live visuals, sound, and performance, exploring themes of identity, generational trauma, inheritance, and what it means to live in a skin that doesn’t feel like your own.
The Skin Show is a queer, trans, one-person multimedia folk-horror séance starring a dermatologist, a medium, my mum, and my dead granny (who insisted on coming along via the medium). The performance blends hand-drawn animation, live visuals, sound, ritual, live performance, and verbatim theatre into an immersive, intimate, and slightly surreal experience that is uncanny, funny, and tender. Our skin renews itself every twenty-seven days, and yet it carries traces of the lives we have lived. What if we could shed those skins and explore them in a wardrobe of personas? The show traces how generations of womanhood have shaped my body, and how those inherited legacies continue to ripple through my relationship with my mum as I transition into a man. Audiences witness and participate in sequences that flicker between dark comedy, unsettling horror, and fragile intimacy, experiencing the ways generational trauma, bodily memory, and inheritance intersect.
Drawing on European werewolf folklore, where lycanthropy was believed to pass through bloodlines, folk tales illuminate bodily and psychological shifts while opening space for laughter, dread, and reflection. Expect engorged vaginas, hair everywhere, and the uncanny alchemy of a body in flux.
