Margate friends, join us for dinner and cabaret before your night of dancing! We're serving soul food and sparkly psychedelic music. In this interactive extravaganza, you will have the opportunity to choose pieces from a musical menu, building the show together with your spiritual server, Mantawoman (they/she). They are a seasoned player of the yangqin - Chinese hammered dulcimer - an iridescent-sounding percussive string instrument. They have been on a two-decade odyssey coming out as genderfluid and transforming their classical practice with queer aesthetics and contemporary influences, which range from Björk to Charli xcx. Vibe-wise, expect fun covers, comedy, traditional Chinese tunes, interactive improvisations, and soul-nourishing singalongs. Featuring radical drag entity Pretzel Cage, this show is giving genre-fluid, it's giving Everything Everywhere All at Once. They're serving you Gaysian Americana seaside hypnopop surrealness.
Prepare to be tantalized!
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Run time 65 minutes, £10 presale, £15 at the door.
Doors 7:30PM
Show 8PM
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HOW TO PRE-ORDER FOOD:
Email hello@olbyscreativehub.co.uk with your entire party's food order, the size of your party, and a name for your reservation, with subject line “Mantawoman Dinner" by 6pm today.
This will help Olby's Soul Cafe serve you dinner at 8pm when the show starts.
MUSIC MENU:
BIO
By day, Mantawoman is Reylon "Manta" Yount (they/them), a scholar, singer-songwriter, and one of the world's premier players of the yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer). Manta toured internationally with the Silkroad Ensemble, playing venues such as Lincoln Center and Tanglewood, and became the first yangqin player to feature on a GRAMMY-winning album (Sing Me Home, 2016). In 2017, after graduating from Harvard College, they won a Marshall Scholarship and moved to London, where they completed two graduate degrees in music. From 2019-2023, Manta co-founded and co-directed the groundbreaking contemporary music collective, Tangram. In 2023, Manta was awarded the inaugural Southbank Centre Studio Residency and Jerwood New Work Fund to support the development of this show.
As a genderfluid, multiracial Chinese American, Manta treats the yangqin as an interface for exploring and producing transcultural identity. Drawing inspiration from Daoist philosophy and marine ecosystems, Manta makes heartfelt songs in a style they call "hypnopop," with a sound reminiscent of Björk and Depeche Mode.
Manta's mission is to inspire people who feel alienated to practice courage, authentic expression and radical joy. Through creativity, they generate cohesion beyond categorization and "mantafest" a reality that is more welcoming of difference.
Learn more at mantawoman.com
Pretzel Cage is a self-producing radical drag entity, blending live art, metaphysics, and traditional drag tropes to create immersive, destabilising theatrical work and cabaret performances. Their work collages lip-sync, projection, costume, and sculptural elements into layered narratives that explore queerness, otherness, consciousness and transformation. A visionary of radical expression, Pretzel Cage invites audiences into charged spaces where identity is fluid, perception is warped, and everything—body, sound, light, and meaning—are composted and reborn. Recent work includes ‘Diseases of Canaries’, a solo piece exploring otherness, adversity, transformation, and the grotesque; and performances with the RSC’s Julius Caesar and member of the touring company Queer C+ntry.