ABOUT

our mission

unladylike co. is an interdisciplinary multi-media (theatre, film, animation) production company formed by Jessica Hood and Rachelle Miguel. Through a feminist, collaborative, and inclusive process, we create and produce new work that is femme-focused. We provide opportunities for women (cis and trans), BIPOC, people with disabilities, and folks who are gender non-conforming, non-binary, and LGBTQIA2+ to have their stories and work represented, both on stage/screen and in production roles. We present our stories, our differing experiences, our perspectives. The stories we tell are euphoric, gut-wrenching, absurd, honest, and empathetic.

Feminism

Inclusion

Collaboration

Empathy

Honesty

Accessibility

Play

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women, we decided we weren’t going to sit around and wait for them to be handed to us, that it was time to make them for ourselves. With that, unladylike co. was born. We started as a theatre company in 2018, with a mission of creating new female-driven plays and performances.

When we decided to start a theatre company, the next important decision was, of course, the name. As two femmes who were told all their lives to be good, well-behaved, ladies, we said f@*% that.

 Being unladylike is defined as “not graceful or polite, or not behaving in a way that is thought to be socially acceptable for a woman, for example by being loud and vulgar.” Yup, that’s us.

 We expose the whole, ugly truth. We are LOUD and STRONG. We are smashing society’s standards and taking down the patriarchy. We are UNLADYLIKE.

We started with Rachelle’s site-specific piece The [Organization], an intimate and thought-provoking piece that unearthed the sexist, racist structures embedded within office culture. We followed that project with two micro-performances for the HIVE Performance Collective: those whom fortune favours at HIVE 2019, which was a vignette-style feminist interpretation of the Sleeping Beauty folktale, and Good Girls at Presentation Haunted House, spooky piece that offered verbatim text of how to be a “good wife” or a “good girl.”

As we were gearing up for another HIVE micro-performance and a production of Jessica’s one-act bad eggs, the COVID pandemic struck and shuttered the doors of live theatre. The entire theatre community made giant pivots, hosting their events in online spaces and in digital formats. HIVE 2021 was reimagined as a digital/open-air experience. Collaborating with Pedro Chamale and Howard Dai, we created two immersive parallel pieces, Follow Me and Tributaries, which simultaneously led audience members from one piece on journey and asked questions whose answers would affect the outcome of the audience members from the other piece. At around the same time, we decided to adapt Jessica’s play bad eggs, a modern, magical reimagining of the Persephone myth, into a film/theatre hybrid piece. When health regulations began to loosen, we were able to host an in-person screening of the film in March 2022, alongside its digital release.

unladylike co. went on a hiatus while Jessica went back to school for animation and had her two kids. Now that we’ve produced a film and Jessica has added animation to their skill set, we are evolving from theatre company to full-on multi-media production company, finding ways to integrate theatre, film-making, and animation into the creation of our new works.