REVIEW: Hot Girls Don't Poo at Backbone Festival 2025

Backbone Festival 2025 has officially kicked off, and I couldn’t be more excited to be there for the pre-opening night. The energy at Seven Hills Hub is exactly what you want from a youth arts festival, buzzing with post-show chatter, surrounded by installations with people eager to experience something new. This year’s festival theme, Look Up: Discover Bold Art, couldn’t be more fitting with a lineup full of emerging local creatives.

One of those bold new voices is Sh*t Stirrers, a new creative collective that definitely live up to their name. Their new development, Hot Girls Don’t Poo!, is wild, weird, and full of experimentation. It’s got a clowning-meets-video-game vibe, with some moments that reminded me of those drunk history videos and other moments feeling like Leah Shelton's works. Through its humour and absurdity, Hot Girls Don’t Poo comments on a clean, sanitised femininity that often denies the real, messy reality of femme bodies. The messaging was not directly given to us. Instead, the performance blends lip-sync, mimed fragments, flashbacks and probably the most poo jokes I’ve heard in my life in a heightened experiment of rebellion.

This isn’t a neatly packaged show, but one that invites you into its process. Audiences can choose to go to a theatre performance or an intimate showing. I got to see the more fringe-style showing, where the performers created a welcoming, relaxed version of the show.

Image by Firemark Photo Media

It is rare to see two performers just play in front of an audience. Madeline Armit and Tai Kane-Potaka are a magnetic duo who commit to silly. While this show uses caricature, physicality and satire, there is a rawness in the play and fun. When artists who devise and generate their own work perform it, we can see an integration of the artist’s identity, process, and politics into the work itself.

That said, it does feel like the piece is still figuring itself out. We are introduced to many styles and broader themes of autonomy and shame but I missed the specificity of just what they were digging into. Endometriosis not existing in the eyes of many Australian men? Femme bodies being in constant performance and sites for fetishisation? Sex education abysmal in the Australian education system? I wasn’t quite sure where to keep my focus. Performing to pre-recorded tracks is an effective core and with some comedic promise, but we really needed more moments that stretched beyond interpretively expressing the text. Perhaps some of my struggles with the piece might be resolved in the full performance version, but the repetition left me grasping instead of fully seeing the vision.

While this piece is not striving for anything polished, more precision in movement sequences to align with each other and the audio would elevate the tension and effect. I encourage the team to delve more into the sound effects and build them into the performance because the voice-over score was a true highlight (that moment the shoes were clomping had us all!) and there is potential to lean in to the video-game style narration that was introduced at the end of the piece.

The new work is still finding its groove, but what’s already there is a clear and confident artistic voice unafraid to play, provoke, and push boundaries. I am excited to see how this piece evolves and comes alive with a larger audience.

You’re absolutely missing out if you’re not going to see at least one of the shows at this year's Backbone Festival. You’ve got 3 weeks and so many great fresh works to see.

Tickets are here!