European Premiere

Forget the Little Mermaid you thought you knew. Meow Meow’s subversive cabaret is a fairytale gone rogue.

The legendary post-post-modern diva takes up residence in International Festival HQ for a festival-long run. Joined by a posse of DIY princes, she gives Hans Christian Andersen’s story of self-sacrifice, seduction and salvation a raucous contemporary make-over.

Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid is a wild and hilarious riot, colliding Andersen’s dark aquatic fantasy with her own mis-adventures in love, blending sparkling frivolity with fierce intelligence – and a blowtorch wit.

Casting salty sea shanties overboard, she conjures instead a glittering world of original songs and compositions by siren collaborators Amanda Palmer, Kate Miller-Heidke, Megan Washington and more. There's passion and poignancy as the mermaid longs to gain a human body, a human soul, the love of a prince... a happy ending.

Adored at last year’s International Festival singing lost and banned Weimar songs alongside Barry Humphries, Meow Meow is the queen of cabaret, mixing pin-sharp one-liners with a voice as smooth and intoxicating as absinthe . She is an award-winning actress, dancer and singer, whose unique brand of performance art exotica has hypnotised, inspired and terrified audiences from New York to Berlin, London to Sydney. She has performed her works with world renowned orchestras such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal amongst other groups and played Titania in Emma Rice's recent A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare's Globe.

Join her on her voyage to a land of altered hearts, minds and body parts, in her very personal vision of Andersen’s bittersweet fable.

Photo: Pia Johnson