00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely this
00:06morning to speak to Naomi Wood. No, Naomi, you are from East Sussex, but you are on the
00:12road and you've got a really enticing date coming up at Worthing Theatres, at Worthing
00:17Assembly Hall on August 15th. Your spoken word and circus show, Bobess. That's right,
00:24not goddess, it's Gobess. Gobess. Explain that title, it's a good striking title, isn't
00:31it? Yeah, Gobess is all about being mouthy and loud, chaotic and messy, embracing your
00:38sort of goblin messiness, a real celebration of, yeah, chaos in all its forms. And it's
00:46also, yeah, about being sort of mouthy and taking up space. And this is you, is it? This
00:52is you, mouthy, messy? Yes, it's, yeah, autobiographical. I suppose it's a little bit of an inversion of
01:01the idea of being a goddess. You know, there's so much pressure put on us to try and be these
01:06sort of ethereal, otherworldly beings. And I was, you know, sort of thinking, well, what
01:11would it be like if we just embrace the mess? Absolutely. Well, Gobess sounds far more interesting
01:17than goddess. But it's your journey. And it's a journey that started from a difficult place,
01:22isn't it? Yeah, so the show is a true story. And it's based on sort of the last 10 to 15 years of
01:31my life, really, after quite a difficult year that I had in 2010 with a cancer operation. And,
01:38you know, totally fine. Now, I'm really lucky. And I was really well looked after. But the experience
01:43sort of really acted as a catalyst for me to think about how I wanted to live my life,
01:49I'd always struggled with anxiety. And really emerging from that time, I wanted to embrace fear
01:57and to be courageous and move towards sort of, yeah, accepting imperfection and shame and sort of
02:06making friends with my own anxiety. And that's the story in this. And you tell it in a number of
02:12different ways, don't you? You draw on your circus background, it's spoken word, how does it work?
02:18So yeah, the show is a true story. And it's told through spoken word and storytelling. And, you know,
02:26I wanted to see what would happen if, like I said, I'm sort of seeing myself as a jack of all trades,
02:31I say, sort of like merging art forms and seeing what happens when you sort of collide them together.
02:36And I wondered what it would be like to perform poems upside down in the aerial hoop, you know,
02:42like this idea of what are people thinking about when they're rehearsing and they're stretching and
02:47their, you know, their perspective shifts when they're upside down. And so, yeah, I brought the two
02:52together. So it's quite a physical show. And I suppose it's also very much about, it's for anyone
02:57that's ever wanted to make anything. So it's this idea of, you know, the creative process sort of
03:02being an ongoing relationship that you're, that you're engaging in. So, you know, sometimes poems
03:09and words come to you when, when you're maybe doing something else. It's that disruption of routine
03:15that sort of seems to feed the creative force.
03:18That sounds great. And I love that idea. You were talking about confronting your anxieties.
03:23What happens when you confront an anxiety? Does it go away?
03:28No, I really don't think it does. But I think that sort of you learn that we are all just like organic
03:36beings and actually living, living in the moment and performance is so much about living in the moment
03:41because so many things can go wrong. And it sort of teaches you this lesson of just like just surrendering
03:47to the moment. And actually, I think something really powerful happens when we are vulnerable,
03:52not just for ourselves, but for other people. It's sort of like such a relief to know that we all feel
03:59sort of anxieties about different things or existential dread, or we feel shame about something we did
04:04five years ago. You know, and I think, yeah, that's, that sort of brings us closer together.
04:09It sounds fantastic. So it's GOBES and it's at the Worthing Assembly Hall on August the 15th and various
04:17other dates, but that's the key one for us.
04:19And that's the only one in East Sussex this year with the full show and the area or so. Yeah, it's exciting.
04:27Well, lovely to meet you. Good luck with everything. And let's chat about the next show when you decide it.
04:33Good to meet you. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye bye. Thank you.
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