Fox&Badge FLASHBACK #9: 2024
2024 was a landmark year for us - three deeply immersive worlds, our 1st F&B festival tent, and a deeper foray into facilitation, workshops, and community.
🐫ISIS & OSIRIS🐫
Heaven always runs its own events on weekends, so we were absolutely thrilled when they offered us a precious May Bank Holiday Sunday evening slot to host Fox&Badge. It felt like an invitation into sacred territory.
The year before, a remarkable man from our F&B community came to a meetup and shared his deep passion for Ancient Egypt - leading monthly tours of the Egyptian collection at the British Museum. He spoke about the richness and complexity of the culture, and how perfectly its mythology, sensuality and symbolism might align with our work. That man was Igor Selivanov - and he didn’t just inspire the idea, he took us to the source! We spent a long weekend with him travelling through Cairo, Giza and Saqqara, walking among temples, tombs and ruins, hunting myths and magic. Isis & Osiris was born there - summoned, rather than designed.
There was so much mythology to incorporate we almost didn’t know where to start;Ancient Egypt centres around its gods and their stories, so we did too. It was the first time we attempted a full narrative arc in a show - the fantastic Sadiq as Osiris, brutally slain by his brother Seth (Luke Trentham Shaw) and gloriously resurrected by his wife Isis (Ephyra). Other gods also made an appearance - the feline Bastet (Lauren) and her parade of kitties and a roaming Anubis (Dave) and his divine assistants weighing the hearts of guests against the feather of Ma’at.
It was another step up for our decor - we had discovered the treasure trove that is Trading Post in west London. Full-size sarcophagi invited guests to climb inside and play with death; Egyptian statues, furniture and relics dressed the space with weight and gravitas.
Heaven is a labyrinth. Its winding corridors, hidden rooms and thresholds mirrored Egyptian ideas of the underworld and afterlife, allowing us to run fantastic separate spaces for people to explore.
We hosted our first ever silent Sensual Sanctuary - a large, silent, tactile room, devoted to the pleasures of the senses & human connection - a playful space to surrender to tantra, tactility,conscious touch, lomi lomi, and multi-handed massage. We explored a sensual take on Egyptian rituals upstairs - offering guests all kinds of gloriously kinky ways to explore mummification & incarceration; BDSM; kinky opening-of-the-mouth rituals and immersions in sand.
In the ambient music room, we hosted a Blue Lotus ceremony (the Egyptian aphrodisiac) just before the event began. It became a space of breathwork, singing and sanctuary - a soft threshold into the night, grounding bodies before descent.
And quietly, tenderly, Welfare became home to a Bastet cat shrine. Almost 50 guests had submitted photos of their beloved pussies to be worshipped. Just as the Egyptians did.
🎪NOISILY FESTIVAL🎪
Alex had been going to Noisily Festival every year since he first gave a workshop there in 2016, and we loved it. When they reached out to F&B looking to bring some edge to the Mind - Body - Soul area, we were so excited. And I’m now so grateful we were part of what turned out to heartbreakingly be their last year running.
We started our planning to just run 3 simple short workshops a day, and somehow ended up with a large tent and team, and a non-stop pageant of activities that rolled from midday to midnight (and beyond), including hosting Noisily’s first and ever dungeon! We had very little space in Alex’s already packed car for decor so in a stroke of genius we decided to deck out our bland tent with boughs, branches, and grasses foraged from the woods around us.
It was such a rich and rewarding experience; such a fulfilling way to experience a festival.
For both Alex & I, facilitating 4 workshops was definitely a stretch outside our comfort zone, but we loved it, and were so exhilarated to discover the interest in this kind of work.
Each day we organised a gentle arc from innocence to kink - a space of warm, energetic, loving connection, of exploration and playfulness. We wanted to run workshops that covered the kinds of things we loved the most and that we wanted but had never quite experienced ourselves. My favourite was our mummification workshop (inspired by our recent foray into Ancient Egypt) where participants lovingly bound one another in cling film.
We sang our souls out to techno, led by the incredible sound healer Ruth Hoey. Sexologist Secret Sauce Angel taught us all how to play the game of seduction. Petite Pretzel beautifully suspended Xena Feels from the limbs of the neighbouring trees. Resident DJs kept the tent rocking all day and into the night.
This whole year we ended up running many workshops as part of our monthly meetups, exploring beautiful experiences involving singing, touch, authenticity and more - a beautiful intimate companion to our larger events.
🍰VERSAILLES🍰
Versailles felt like another threshold moment for us.
It was our first foray into a major gig venue - Electric Brixton - and we leaned fully into what its bones offered: a grand, theatrical architecture that could finally hold the scale of spectacle we’d been quietly dreaming about for years. A stage wide enough to feel imperial; balconies that became royal boxes; sightlines that let performance, music and crowd constantly see - and seduce - one another.
Two visual motifs anchored the whole night: chandeliers and four-poster beds - both ancient symbols of opulence, sensuality and power. Cass from Rogue Artworks created exquisite bespoke 3D-printed candelabras, which were the star of the stage (and her 3D-printed costumes the night).handeliers reappeared in unexpected forms - culminating in Nik YourKnots’ utterly magical human chandelier, where Lexie’s body was gently raised, ringed with candlelight, transmuted into living illumination. It was one of those moments where the room fell into reverent silence before erupting in awe. Our event culminated with Natalie, Emma & Luke storming the palace and majestically swinging from the giant central aerial-prop chandelier which we’d had specially fabricated.
The four-poster beds became something else entirely. Built on wheels, curtained in voile, they roamed the edges of the dancefloor - sometimes separate, sometimes rolled together into a larger stage. They were places of rest, mischief, performance, and sudden eruption; porous thresholds between watching and being watched. Looking back, they marked a real evolution in how we think about stages - less fixed, more alive.
And then there was cake. So much cake.
Versailles had its own working patisserie, presided over by our glorious royal baker, Katie, who created and curated a steady flow of sweet abundance throughout the night. Courtiers fed one another by hand; strangers were anointed with cream.
Musically, Versailles was a quiet revolution. Here we began to wake up to the real possibility of DJs leaning fully into the theme - collaborating deeply with live musicians, letting classical lineage and electronic pulse truly converse. DANEC’s techno reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with harp and mezzo-soprano felt like a manifesto for where we want to go next; Soanne’s live vocals and instrumentation softened and lifted the room; and throughout the night, fire returned - not just as spectacle, but as ritual punctuation.
Seth Schwarz roamed the crowd with his violin - sometimes on stage, sometimes in the bed with the courtesans, sometimes suddenly beside you - blurred the boundary between DJ and performer, court musician and rebel.
Underneath all the gold and grandeur, Versailles was never about glorifying monarchy. If anything, it was about overturning it - taking a symbol of absolute power and redistributing it completely. Every stage was shared; every body was invited; abundance flowed outward. The palace belonged to the people.
🔥MAD MAXXX🔥
Mad MaXXX could not have been a starker contrast to the refinement of Versailles. Where Versailles revelled in excess, lace and sweetness, Mad MaXXX stripped everything back to survival. White silk gave way to black diesel. Cake ceded to sand. It felt important to place these two worlds side by side in the same year: civilisation and collapse, order and chaos, abundance and ingenuity.
As a crew, we watched the films together. It was a great way to bond and collectively dream about what we could build. We felt so drawn to this powerful underlying myth: the survivor archetype; the way beauty persists after devastation; the way tenderness emerges, improbably, from brutality. Mad Max isn’t ultimately about destruction; it’s about redemption and the softening of warriors; an oasis of hope.
It was our first deep exploration of lactation and milking - inspired by Immortan Joe’s unsettling Milking Mothers of Fury Road, but consciously reclaimed. It was one of my favourite acts I’ve ever done - I loved celebrating the liquid of life and we quickly overthrew our milker - and milk seems to be now present in so many of our shows, as it is in so many of our lives!
Mad MaXXX was the second time we really felt our soundtracks becoming inseparable from the theme. Alongside the electronic backbone, rock energy tore through the night - anchored by our very own Doof Warrior guitarist, Adriaan, for whom genius Ryan created an epic flame-throwing guitar.
Despite the ferocity of the setting, Mad MaXXX became - unexpectedly - our most redemptive Halloween event. Again and again, refuge appeared: the Green Place upstairs; the Sanctuary where bodies could rest, soften, and be held; the convergence of bodies, conflict becoming communion.
The closing aerial act - a beautiful, aching aerial duo by Jimmy and Rebecca - undid me completely. Two warriors slowly surrendering into love in the sky. I cried watching it. I kept thinking: how wonderful that something of this skill, intimacy and profundity can unfold in a nightclub. Not on a theatre stage. Not at arm’s length. But here - among all of us. The opportunity for transformation felt so vividly real.
