The Skin Show - Theatre

By Jocelyn Affleck. Suitable for age 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.
Developed with the support of Bryony Kimmings, Eloina Haynes, and Hayley McGee, whose workshops shaped the ritual and emotional core of the piece, the show has grown through experimentation in immersive storytelling, hand-drawn animation, live audiovisual integration, and verbatim theatre. My permanent residency at Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol has allowed me to further explore the relationship between animation, performance, and ritual, blending digital and analogue techniques to amplify the folk-horror, queer, and trans surrealism at the heart of the work.
How do we care for a skin that never fully fit, and how do we claim the one we were meant to live in?