Frankenstein - How to Make a Monster

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From 6 young people at their free after school Beatbox club to The runaway No.1 smash hit of the 2019 Edinburgh Festival! How did it come to be & where will it go from here?

The Cast of Frankenstein How To Make a Monster in Battersea Art Centre's Gothic Grand Hall.

“A tremendous show...a rip-it-to-pieces-and-remake-it production that galvanises the heart of Shelley’s exclamatory gothic novel with vocal percussion, rap and soaring song.”

— ★★★★★ - The Observer

Having been a member of the BAC Beatbox academy for 8 years and counting Aminita has always felt that BAC had faith in her talent, they had supported her college applications and offered her numerous professional performance opportunities from lavish tents at Lattitude festival to Belting ballads on BBC Two. Then as she started drama school BAC proposed their first paid beatbox academy production. They had noticed a few members who had kept coming over the years despite the drop in nature of the Free All levels academy and just how much these few had improved under the guidance of Conrad Murray (Artistic Director of Beatbox Academy & Director of Frankenstein- How To Make A Monster) it was then that BAC selected the most elite within the academy to create something new.

Why Frankenstein?

'We had covered so many songs from Phil Collins to Drake' - Aminita Francis . The Beatbox Academy were no stranger to renditions, frequently embracing other artist' style and then chopping and changing it to fit their 100% Acapella performances and so why not 'cover' a Novel... This would be a year long project, the results of which would be performed in 2018.

As the cast were young they wanted to cover a young successful writer... Mary Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein, a story the whole academy had at least heard of. Add to this that in her time Shelley had to publish anonymously due to the opinions of the public of female writers at the time all of which resonated with the young academy who had been told beatboxing isn't art, and to 'give it up' several times. align this with the fact that the females within the academy identified more as writers/singers than beatboxers and that 2018 would be 200 years of suffrage and we had a unanimous vote.