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We are raising funds to bring "July 15th to ...", this one-woman physical theatre show to Edinburgh Fringe 2026.
Hello! Thank you so much for taking the time to visit this fundraiser page and support our project.
We are raising support to bring our one-woman physical theatre show to Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Space @ Niddry theatre from 24th-29th this August 2026. This show tells the story of Ella, an artist living with bipolar disorder, and her ongoing fight to find balance and healing.
I’m Stephanie, a theatre producer originally from China, and this piece grew from deeply personal reflections on bipolar disorder, emotional survival, and healing. Creating this work has been an unpredictable but incredibly valuable and precious journey for me.
You Only Notice Us at the Extremes
Why we need more honest conversations about bipolar lived experience.
Over time, I realised how difficult it can be for many people to get professional mental health support, especially around bipolar disorder. Even now, there is still such a painful gap between how bipolar disorder is lived and how it is understood in society. So, I wanted to make something honest, a story that speaks to the loneliness, chaos, fear, and hope that so many people quietly carry inside themselves.
This project is created by a female-led ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) creative team who care deeply about telling honest, emotionally truthful stories on stage. As emerging artists, we want to create work that feels human, compassionate, and unafraid to speak about experiences that are often misunderstood or hidden away.
I wanted to use theatre to explore that gap — not through statistics or clinical explanations, but through feeling, movement, and lived human experience.
When words begin to fail, the body becomes the storyteller.
Through physical theatre, music, movement, and fragmented memories, the show follows Ella, an artist trying to hold herself together inside a mind that never stays still for long. We are drawn into the reality of her life with bipolar disorder, marked by intense emotional shifts, grief, and a powerful struggle to find balance.
Euphoric. Drained. Restless. Empty.
Some nights, Ella is overflowing with energy, creating endlessly as thoughts race faster than her body can carry them. Other days, the weight of simply existing feels unbearable. Time bends and fractures around her. Memories return without warning. Fear slips into reality. Her body keeps moving through what won’t stay steady — searching for balance, release, and something solid enough to hold onto.
This piece is not about “explaining” bipolar disorder. It is about inviting audiences to sit inside its rhythm, chaos, tenderness, exhaustion, and humanity — even just for a moment.
Why This Piece Matters
This story is not just about Ella. At its core, this piece is a love letter.
A love letter to people who lying awake at 3am trying to survive their own minds.
To people who feel too much, too fast, or not at all.
To people who have lost control and are terrified of being seen differently.
To people trying to keep functioning while quietly falling apart inside.
And also to the friends, partners, families, and loved ones who stay beside them, often without fully knowing how to help, but still choosing to stay.
It is also for audiences who may never experience these feelings themselves but still want to understand other people more deeply and compassionately.
We first shared the work at Camden Fringe 2025, where it connected strongly with audiences and gave us the chance to understand what this piece could truly become. Since then, we have continued developing the work into a more physically ambitious and emotionally honest production for Edinburgh Fringe 2026.
The show has already received encouraging responses, including:
“Delivers a Punch” — The Reviews Hub
“A space to reflect” — Everything Theatre
We are also in conversations with mental health organisations about how this work can continue creating dialogue and awareness beyond the stage. We hope to raise awareness around bipolar disorder through theatre and explore how performance can shape conversations in society with more care, honesty, and humanity. We hope this piece can encourage reflection — not only about mental health itself, but about how we listen to, support, and stand beside one another.
Why We Need Your Support
Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is an incredible opportunity, but for independent artists, it is also a huge financial challenge. For immigrant artists and emerging creatives especially, making theatre in the UK often means constantly fighting for resources, visibility, stability, and the chance to keep creating at all.
Your support will help us cover rehearsal space, venue hire, travel, accommodation, technical costs, marketing, and fair pay for the artists and collaborators dedicating themselves to this work.
Every donation, no matter the size, genuinely helps us continue.
More than that, your support tells us this story matters. It tells us there is space for vulnerable, human, complicated stories to exist in theatre.
What Your Support Means
By supporting this project, you are helping independent artists continue creating work that is brave, personal, and deeply human. You are helping audiences encounter stories that may make them feel seen for the first time. You are helping conversations around bipolar disorder move beyond stereotypes and misunderstanding.
You are helping Ella’s story reach the stage — but also the stories of so many people who quietly carry fear, exhaustion, chaos, tenderness, hope, and survival inside themselves every day.
For us, this is more than bringing a show to Edinburgh. It is about connection. Visibility. Care. And creating a space where people can sit together and feel a little less alone.
What We Can Give Back
We are incredibly grateful for every person supporting this project. Depending on donation tiers, we hope to offer thank-you credits, behind-the-scenes updates, rehearsal content, postcards from Edinburgh, and opportunities to connect with the creative process as the show develops.
Thank you for believing in this work and for helping us bring this story to Edinburgh this summer.
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Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 11th August 2026 at 7:30pm