We last caught up with Amanda Grace when she was performing her show about trephination last year across the UK. As a performer, her practice often blends an interesting mix of care practice into her work, and she’s back with a brand new work-in-progress piece exploring Florida’s folklore monster the Snoligoster. The piece is headed to the stage for the first time at Camden People’s Theatre as part of their SPRINT Festival next week.

Amanda and her team have partnered up with The Queer Trans Project and S.W.A.N of Orlando to raise mutual aid for grassroots work for LGBTQIA+ civil rights and radical social work in Florida by providing merch at the performance. With lots to talk about we thought it was high time we caught up with Amanda for a pixelated pint to dive headfirst into the swamp with Snoligoster.

You can catch Snoligoster at Camden People’s Theatre as part of SPRINT Festival on the 19th March at 9pm (45mins). Tickets are available through the Venue’s Online Box Office.

Jake: Hi Amanda! Your upcoming show ‘Snoligoster’ follows a character emerging from a swamp to ‘set the record straight’. Tell us what a Snoligoster is and what made you put her story on stage.

Amanda: Hi Jake! It always makes my heart smile to have a chat with you about the latest bit of strangeness I’m sending off into the world.

Last year, as part of my Global Talent visa preparations, I took Love In to Orlando Fringe, and had the unexpected opportunity to experience the things I loved about my hometown without the baggage I carried through my upbringing. A big part of my personal practise has been returning to folktales and myths, and I realised whilst perusing my childhood bookshop that I had never heard any legends from Florida beyond ghost walks around St. Augustine—which seemed strange for a place so very other.

I came back to London with a book called Florida Folktales, a compendium of transcribed oral stories handed down by Floridians. Among the creatures crawling these pages was the Snoligoster.

Picture a sort of alligator-seal-manatee body, and remove the limbs; now, add a big spike on the back and a motorboat propellor at the end of the tail. That’s a Snoligoster. It’s so obviously ridiculous and such a camp Florida pastiche that I couldn’t help but fall in love a little bit.

At the same time, I had been trying for a long time to write a story that was both funny and good, but everything I was writing was just not as funny as the things that had started erupting from my mouth. It seemed, after three years of settling and three thousand miles between us, there was finally enough space to objectively paw through recollections from my upbringing in the cultish Southern Baptist Convention.

Like many traumatised people, I desperately wanted to have nothing to do with the thing that traumatised me; like the ex in a particularly bad break-up, I didn’t ever want to begin to think about Jesus again, let alone have him in my workplace.

The problem was, nothing I wrote was as funny or good as these revelations that confounded my new community with other-worldly wonder. Sharing them gave people a window into what exactly went wrong along the way in my psyche, but also made me feel like a freak.

Amidst this resistance, I found the Snoligoster, my fellow freak from Florida. And if this was the story that wouldn’t let me not tell it, I at least had a lens through which to filter it.

Jake: Tell us about the process of creating the character of the Snoligoster and how you’ve developed her.

Amanda: There were sort of two initial priorities for the Snoligoster. I really wanted her to force me to be as strange as possible in front of the audience, and I wanted them to love her as much as I did. I wanted her to reflect all the things I love about where I’m from: the cellular-level queerness, the complete commitment to sensual experience, the thinness of the veil between whimsy and whatever ‘real life’ is.

The problem with oral folktales is that, by their nature, they have no ‘owners’, and the first mention of a particular folk character can be difficult to pin down. In researching the history of the Snoligoster, it became clear that its original appearance was much more sinister than its later iterations let on.

Like most things in Floridian history (or Southern American history, or any empirical history), if you dig deep enough, the history of the Snoligoster is marred by racism.

In trying to understand how to address those origins in a caring way, while studying the history of political polarisation and the indoctrination across American history, the history of the Snoligoster that we stumbled upon halfway through developing the show actually mirrored the history of the religious far-right, particularly of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose roots in white supremacy are both routinely denied or ignored in modern churches, and also just, on a basic level, easily proveable and heavily documented.

I knew that history needed to stay, alongside all the other xenophobias the evangelical far-right normalises planting deep within Americana. I also knew that the Snoligoster needed to reflect the people that carry those beliefs in society today: she needed to be charming, and very sheltered; her upbringing needed to be heavily controlled to the certain end of being able to not only police others’ behaviours and thoughts, but her own.

In addition to all this, the Snoligoster needed to be someone people could find both reprehensible in her current state and also, ultimately, redeemable. For people outside groups like the SBC, it’s really easy to pin the forces they exude down to some kind of inherent evil; having been raised in it from birth, it’s apparent that, if you make people afraid on a cellular level and then tell them there is only one ‘narrow road’ they can walk to rid themselves of that fear, they’re going to walk. And the only way people leave that world is if they can see an existence without daily, moment-to-moment, eternal fear outside that road.

We’ve done a lot of fine-tuning on the Snoligoster, because audiences need to see both the very fucked up nature of her upbringing, and the total presence of that in her standing before them, but they also need to see that, if she hadn’t been created that way by the forces that controlled her, she could have been different. And we need to believe that she could be different.

Sonya Renee Taylor talks in her work about how transformational justice places the burden of rehabilitating oppressors on those of us who are safe to do so. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe enough to interact with the SBC, but I did know that audiences needed to see that process happen with the Snoligoster.

Jake: You describe the piece as a ‘camp swampland fantasia’, but the piece delves into some deeper themes. Tell us about them and what you are hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?

Amanda: I hope the reckoning that the Snoligoster is offered gives audiences the confidence to reckon with the oppressors they meet in their lives, where it’s safe to do so.

It’s not a surprise far-right sentimentality is growing brazen in the world today. Those roots have been part of the empire system from the start; they’re fundamental to it. When strangers hear I’m from Florida, they always remark about how insane it is, as if the very same things they find disdainful or disgusting about Florida or America aren’t very visibly and proudly at rise across the UK. It’s really easy to delude ourselves that we can just wash our hands of the interconnected oppressions that so evidently work through the world, and so much harder to sit with the fact that to do is to allow them to continue.

My original goal with SNOLIGOSTER was to tell a story that made people see, given the circumstances, so often the people we pride ourselves on being apart from—more cultured, or kinder, or simply better than—couldn’t be any other way. I wanted to make something that prevented anyone from ever making a smart remark about where I’m from again. When the piece started to get messier and realer, it became clear that part of its purpose would be to call audiences into caring enough to do deconstruct the systems they once smirked at from afar in hands-on, practical ways.

If dreams come true, audiences will leave SNOLIGOSTER more driven to get their own house, country, community, world in order. At the very least, I hope they leave more compassionate, and more prepared to engage with transformational justice when they would otherwise shut down or dissociate.

Jake: Tell us about how the show has ended up being performed at the Camden People’s Theatre and about your relationships with the other creative involved.

Amanda: I pitched this show to CPT’s SPRINT Fesitval call-out before the election, and I’m sure it seemed like incredibly timely programming afterwards! But I think CPT has always been a place committed to platforming conversations that involve and reflect the community—and things that are devoted to the strange and weird. It seemed like a natural fit, and I’m really grateful they’ve said yes.

All the SPRINT artists I’ve spoken with ahead of the Festival have been lovely, and they’re all telling timely and important stories. Binge Fringe readers should see absolutely all of them—especially Déviniat’s show TwinBond., who is our day twin at SPRINT!

I was in Manchester doing a bit of guest lecturing when I met my friend, Jess Corner, for what ended up being the worst pizza I have ever eaten, and they mentioned they were looking to dive back into directing again, after focusing on voice for a while. And I knew that I was in a place where I needed an outside eye to hold the piece because all of it is a) a lot to balance artistically and narratively, and b) still raw in places for me to handle.

Jess and I began our friendship as penpals back when I was required to be in the church, and is actually my longest-standing friend. Jess has seen me through the absolute mess my ubringing made, as well as the many different and unpredictable effects its legacy has on me today. In life and in work, Jess has the perfect set of long pointy sticks to handle me with; she knows when I need to be told to just do the thing I’m obsessing about, or speak up, or shut up, and she knows when to leave me to work through something myself. So it was only natural that they be the director on this piece.

We have a cameo performance from my partner, who’s a fantastic character actor in all the ways I could never be. Noor El Huda Bashir lended her expertise to sensitivity read the script ahead of rehearsals, and Hunter Johns made an incredible poster that people keep raving about. Everyone who’s touched the piece is just an incredible creature in their own right, and I couldn’t recommend or thank any of them enough for picking up what I’ve tried to put down and coming along for the chaos.

Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?

Amanda: Like all Floridians, the Snoligoster was weaned on margaritas and key lime pie from a very early age. We’ve concocted a margarita just for the show, The Factory of Love, which smashes together the delicate flavour of London and the sunshine sour of Florida into one salt-rimmed, gulpable experience. (We’ve kept this one non-alcoholic, to keep the Snoligoster out of trouble.)

We’ve done a recipe card for The Factory of Love that’s being sent out as a thank-you to tippers at our Snolly Show Support fund, so if any Binge-Fringers are tempted, they can make their very own at home!

You can catch Snoligoster at Camden People’s Theatre as part of SPRINT Festival on the 19th March at 9pm (45mins). Tickets are available through the Venue’s Online Box Office.