www.notionfashion.co.nz-Bittersweet-Cadbury-New-Zealand-Megan-Fairley

Hello Chocolate Queens & Kings,

You would never imagine that the Cadburys story would make it to the stage but it has.  It is because it is a huge powerful story about pain and resilience.  When you think of Chocolate you think of good things because it brings so much joy to one’s life.  One of Cadbury’s mottos was simply to feel the joy.  There was so much heartbreak attached to our Cadburys redundancy and for myself that pain grew with even more hurt.  There is nothing worse in this world than to be struggling with mental illness and to face bullying and discrimination on top of this pain.  This happened not just to myself but also to my fellow ex-cadburys staff.  This pain of experiencing a completely different culture, (absolutely not one that I ever want to be a part of) only highlighted and made our Cadburys Chocolate culture look even more amazing.  

The Chocolate Queen story is about our amazing  chocolate culture of love, laughter, respect and kindness.  Pain and resilience, the most powerful thing in this world is not money nor flags, it is a story, and at the bottom of the world lyes one of the world’s biggest stories waiting to be told.  Chocolate Queens and Kings turn their pain into power. 

Thank you!! 

Thank you so much for the amazing people and schools of Dunedin who came out to the Toitu Otago Early Settlers Museum to listen to this very cool story.  It means so much to the Cadburys staff, more than you will ever know.  

Thank you to the fabulous team of actors who played our parts. They did the most amazing job!!!  Thank you so much Clare Adams, Cheryl Amos, Jodie Bate and Karen Elliot.  Hopefully this fab performance can grow in popularity and be taken around New Zealand at some point so all of New Zealand would get an opportunity to hear the story.  In the meantime I will put some sneak peaks of the production up on social media! @meganfairley_chocolatequeen  

The BITTERSWEET Low Down

Bittersweet is a timely celebration of the day-to-day life of one of Dunedin’s iconic industries 

This engaging and revealing short piece of verbatim theatre shares the stories of seven Cadbury’s women workers – of life in the factory, and what it brought to the city, and the world. 

In performance, the work stories are vividly related in a very unusual way.  With the audio of the workers’ interviews playing in their ears, actors repeat the women’s original words as they are heard. 

The women are just some of thousands of workers over the years. Theirs are the everyday stories behind the colourful promotion of our favourite chocolate treats, produced in their millions at the factory for nearly 150 years. And as with most readily available items, we don’t often think of how they are made 

Production in this iconic piece of Dunedin history has ceased. Its workers have left, its machines long-gone, the very buildings are now disappearing. Very soon, stories – memories – will be the only things that remain of Cadbury Dunedin. 

Bittersweet acknowledges the work of all Cadbury’s workers, and aims to make the ordinary extraordinary, even if just for a short time. 

Thank you so much Chocolate Queens and Kings for your amazing support, so grateful and it means so much to this women from the Chocolate Factory,  because you are creating and pulling this story along and making it grow, THANK YOU!!!!  

www.meganfairley.co.nz

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