MARIANNE DISSARD & MEGAN GARRETT-JONES

Presented by: Tom Thumb Theatre

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0	MARGATE: The Tom Thumb Theatre
P	Thursday 27th September, 2018
N	8:00pm

Event information

A collaboration between two of Ramsgate's most mischievous writers and performers, Marianne Dissard and Megan Garrett-Jones, who bring to Margate's Tom Thumb Theatre their adaptation of Dissard's book 'Not Me', a visceral memoir of recovery, through yoga and friendship, from eating disorders and a life on the road as a touring musician.

The Thursday 27 September work-in-progress showing includes songs and excerpts of the book performed by Dissard, and contextualized by Garrett-Jones acting as her alter-ego. This colorful and deeply moving performance invites us to a journey of self-discovery and a critique of the mental healthcare status-quo.



Producer John Parish (PJ Harvey) on book 'Not Me' : "Not just painfully honest, but visceratingly, brutally honest. Marianne Dissard’s description of living with bulimia gives an uncomfortably physical riposte to the widely misheld idea that it is basically nipping off to the bathroom to throw up dessert. Lacking even the noxious fake glamour of anorexia, bulimia is exposed in all its controlling wretchedness as Dissard struggles with the condition, while at the same time managing independently to sustain an international career as a touring singer songwriter. This is not a manual for how to deal with bulimia – it is a struggle for survival, and ultimately self-acceptance."

MARIANNE DISSARD is a French-born singer, producer and filmmaker from Tucson, Arizona who has toured her desert noir chanson worldwide. Her first book, 'Not Me', will be available this winter. She moved to Ramsgate in 2017.

MEGAN GARRETT-JONES (Things With Words, Looping The Loop's Flex) is an artist of disparate belongings, residing between London and Ramsgate, and still thinking of Australia as home. Her work is grounded in performance, incorporating many other forms including; writing, video art, photography, walking, cooking, and curating.

"Being given such stark access to someone's private world could be disturbing (it is), should be uncomfortable (it can be), but when the internal dialogue is as frank and compelling as Marianne's, the overarching emotion it elicits is compassion. There's humour too, it's just dark... from banquets for one in a Parisian apartment to almost thriller like gastronomic chases through the backstreets of Palermo seeking fulfillment or a desire ultimately for nothingness ... this is one very human story." - Shaun Hendry

"My overwhelming feeling was of reading something that I shouldn't be reading. Like stumbling across someone's secret diary at the bottom of a drawer. It isn't the sort of memoir that's designed to come across as 'raw' and 'honest' in a way that makes the writer look cool, it's actually genuinely honest to a degree that few people ever achieve even when writing purely for themselves. It's also refreshingly free of attempts to explain and justify and conceptualise, which only heightens the thrill of being privy to someone's private rather than public thoughts." = Raphael Mann