Mama Quilla is an award-winning woman-led performing arts company spotlighting human rights issues. It was founded by Kay Adshead and Lucinda Gane in 1999 to offer a female perspective on the big issues of the day.
The Financial times praised our “passionate concern about oppression”. The Guardian reported “Mama Quilla shows that theatre still has the capacity to address public issues". Public Reviews said “Mama Quilla excels at taking personal experiences and transposing them to a beautiful, if at times uncomfortable, form of art’’. One World, on Mama Quilla reported our production “A magnificent fantastical roar against a world in which half the population is excluded, ignored, derided, mistreated".
Major productions in the UK include The Bogus Woman, Bites, Bones, which were performed at the Bush Theatre and published by Oberon Books. All have been subsequently produced internationally, The Bogus Woman (La Femme Fantôme) and Bones (Bones/Les Os) by La Compagnie Yorick and Bites (Morsi/Bisse) by Teatrificio and Theatre Factory in Los Angeles. Also, Theatre of Protest at The Roundhouse, Acts of Defiance -The Festival at Theatre503, and Veil which transferred to the Alchemy festival on the South Bank.
Mama Quilla also works in forgotten and neglected communities, with the vulnerable and dispossessed, creating innovative street/site-specific performance theatre, celebrating their voices and exploring their experience.
