I’ve edited together a few clips from ‘How to Run Away,’ which was one of the winners of the New Wave Theatre scriptwriting opportunity to perform for three nights at the Bloomsbury Festival, October 2023 in London. We also received Arts Council Funding to produce the show.
Some of the audience feedback included:
“I laughed, shed tears and loved the passion in Lucy’s storytelling.”
“I was absolutely amazed by this show. I was totally mesmerised and fascinated by the storytelling and the dancing was fantastic.”
And in case you missed it… here’s the interview that Betty and I recorded with Bloomsbury Radio in September, ahead of the performances at the Bloomsbury Festival. Along with a few more snaps taken by the very talented at Will Gillham Headshots.
At the start of 2018 everyone died. Lucy left a successful career, retrained as an English teacher and moved to Egypt. Everyone thought she’d be home within weeks. This one woman show tells the highs, lows and life lessons of moving halfway across the world, as well as one very unexpected new job. Expect laughter, brutal honesty, and a ton of belly dancing in the aisles.
Warning: This show will have the Shirley Valentine effect on in-therapy millennials looking for self-inflicted instagrammable trauma.
The Team
Writer and Performer: Lucy Andrina
Director: Betty Chequers
Technical & FOH support kindly provided by the Bloomsbury Festival
Hot Trip Theatre is a newly formed theatre company. A collaboration between two women in their thirties: Betty and Lucy.
Betty Chequers is a director, teacher, musician, performer and live art creator, who has a passion for anything quirky, feral and fantastic; creating out of the box shows that always leave you questioning your sanity.
Lucy Andrina is a British performance artist, writer and belly dancer trained in Cairo, Egypt, with impulsively itchy feet; making hilarious, slightly chaotic but surprisingly poignant theatre.
How to Run Away is brought to you as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2023 through the New Wave emerging artists programme.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
We want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has helped in the production of this show including:
Penny & Sian at the Wick, Langport.
Ian & The Hatch
Everyone who recorded voiceovers
Eman Mahmoud
Our friends and family who’ve put up with us on our artistic journey
Lucy’s therapist, nutritionist and hypnotherapist who sorted her out.
A lot has happened over the last few months. In February/March I was living in Egypt. I had a manager, was dancing on a boat. I loved working with the drummer and band, that was awesome. But there were problems and I realised I was physically unwell – I was tired, drained and I knew my endometriosis had come back. I got on a plane and came home.
I’m delighted to say that due to some major changes, I feel fantastic. I will write about this in the coming months, because I’ve learnt a lot about the brain – gut connection and it has transformed me.
Whilst I was still in Egypt, I received confirmation that we had received Arts Council funding for the show ‘How to Run Away,’ which will be performed at the Bloomsbury Festival in October. As part of the funding we were able to go on an artist residency to Somerset where we put together the show and presented a Work in Progress performance (likewise, that’s another post soon).
Today, I just want to share some videos from a gig at Farley Farm, the former home of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. I’m so happy with these videos, you can see how much the changes to my health have transformed my body and movements. I’m so excited to see where I go and what happens next!
My second article for Verge magazine has just been posted online. Here, I touch on some of the complex issues around TEFL, English and teaching and learning languages. These don’t get spoken about enough and I think they’re important!
I woke up to the sound of the air raid siren from the city centre. I dozed back to sleep, when my phone starting making a very loud piercing alert that forced me up. I could hear every other phone across the hotel screaming the same sound. I got up, got dressed and went into breakfast. Everyone behaved as normal. “Good morning, what would you like to eat?” (through gesture, as English isn’t that common in Ukraine and I wasn’t there long enough to learn). There was a mother and son, sat eating and a soldier walked in for his solo breakfast. Nothing seemed out of place, despite the alerts. These were normal here. But the sound on my phone from the air raid alert app wasn’t.
After breakfast, I decided the safest place to be was the bus station. At least I would be ready to leave the country, should anything happen; lots of people were around and I could follow them. Whilst sat waiting, for about 4 hours, I checked the news – that morning Putin had authorised cruise missile attacks across Ukraine and they’d hid the hydro power plant in Chernitvsi. It was on our doorstep.
I was exhausted when I arrived back in Chernitvsi after teaching at the camp. It had been a long week and a half. I’d got sick. It was a challenging environment to teach in and it was less about English teaching than keeping students entertained. They’d been lots of evening activities and events and the goodbyes were really hard. I find these particularly hard with students you perhaps haven’t clicked with immediately, but spent the week winning them over. Those goodbyes are the hardest, because it’s genuine. And we were all aware of what they were going back to in Kiev, Odessa, Chernobyl. I can’t say too much about the work itself, but it was complex and I was really exhausted by the end. And I’m not sure if I did my best work, there were lots of levels to the teaching.
I nearly didn’t make it to the hotel. Ukraine has been the hardest country to access cash, wifi and all the necessities you’d normally expect, particularly in Europe. I managed to find a cafe with wifi and had a beer. There I downloaded bolt onto my phone, so I could get a car to the hotel. From there, I found a cash machine and everything worked out ok. I just slept for a day and a half.
I did walk into town to investigate, but I can honestly say (having been in some quite dangerous places), I felt very uncomfortable walking around the streets. =I wonder if the weather had been less bleak, it might have felt safer. I feel safer in Egypt.
The journey out of the country was long and eventful. My colleague nearly didn’t make it out of Ukraine due to visa confusion. Then the entry into Poland took quite literally hours due to visa stamping and putting all our luggage through security checks. We were stood waiting for at least an hour – turned out the guy had been asleep and didn’t even check the scanner anyway. These situations, make my blood boil. On arrival back in Poland, I felt sweaty, disgusting. And found a cafe to sit for the day as I had to do some online training!
….
On a personal level, it confirmed that I want to move away from teaching. I don’t thrive in teaching. It requires so much planning and you really have to believe it’s your vocation. My vocation is creative endeavours, in fact, this week I affirmed that I’m best at community engagement, project management and event production. I thrive in these jobs particularly if given lots of creative freedom – teaching is too structured and formulaic for me.
The Bellydancing Backpacker 