A show looking at the absurdity of society from a female perspective is ending its tour in performer Rachel Fullegar's home county. She tells Joanna Davis how her innovative show came about,

A performer who surprised teachers at her prestigious dance school by speaking on stage is bringing her critically acclaimed genre-busting show back to her home town.

Rachel Fullegar and her theatre group Gracefool Collective will perform This Really is Too Much at Weymouth College and Dorchester Corn Exchange next week.

The dance comedy is a dark and radical look at society from a female perspective and is packed with slapstick and situations faced by women in everyday life.

Gracefool Collective is based in Leeds but Rachel, 28, was born in Litton Cheney near Dorchester, before her family moved to Weymouth and she attended Chickerell Primary School and then Budmouth College, studying dance at GCSE and A-level.

Rachel first became interested in performance because her grandmother was the treasurer for the Bridport Pantomime Players. She then started dancing at Bernard Gale's School of Dance in Bridport and the Lyric School of Dance.

During Rachel's studies at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, she rapidly realised that one of her main strengths lay in making people laugh.

"I started talking on stage," Rachel recalls.

"And when I started talking people started laughing and a couple of very supportive teachers said to me 'go for it'. I started to write comedy and theatre pieces."

In what Rachel describes as 'a happy coincidence', she and three other students at the school - Kate Cox, Sofia Edstrand and Rebecca Holmberg -realised they all had an interest in comedy and dance and Gracefool Collective was born.

Rachel said: "There are four of us and two of them are Swedish and they are some of the funniest women I know and we all have similar ideas about theatre. The first piece we did together was an interactive auction in which the auctioneer was a rapper and we had lots up for auction such as 'true love' and 'a cup of tea'.

Together as a group Gracefool Collective decided to 'push the boundaries', Rachel said.

"Contemporary dance can be quite beige and we felt there were more exciting things we could be doing," she said. Their pioneering new style didn't affect the group's final marks, with them all graduating with first class honours from Northern School of Contemporary Dance.

It took six years for This Really Is Too Much to come together.

Rachel said: "It was a long six years of finding people who could vouch and advocate for our work. We were lucky to find people who could give us studio space and grants."

Powerfully satirical piece This Really Is Too Much proved a hit with critics at the Edinburgh Festival and was then extended to a one hour piece.

Gracefool Collective then toured the show to Sweden, where it won top award, the Grand Prix prize, at the Stockholm Festival. It then went on tour to locations across the UK, with the Weymouth and Dorchester performances winding up the tour on November 27 and 28.

Rachel said she is delighted the show has struck a chord with the audience.

"I think we are in a very interesting moment for women. With technology, ideas are being shared on a much wider scale and people are starting to say 'maybe that's not okay that this previous experience happened to me."

"When you grow up you realise the world is not as nice as you think it will be."

The group of women are aged between 28 and 29 and the show sees them bring some of their own experiences to the stage.

Rachel said: "As a woman you feel like you have to prove yourself. It can be difficult to find work and social media makes you feel like you have to prove yourself.

"For me personally my character came out of an interaction I had with a choreographer who told me my voice was too high and I was too attractive to make a political point.

"I have some interesting things to say in the show. My character is a beauty queen who changes over the course of the show.

"The characters speak to the audience a lot in the piece. The humour comes from them trying to do something.

"The show is also a bit about women not listening to each other as much as they should and women not being supportive of each other."

Humour plays a big part in This Really Is Too Much, Rachel said.

"There's a lot of slapstick in the show and there's a bit that the audience really enjoys, where there's this insane job interview and crazy questions being asked, where you think 'I have no idea' about questions where you're asked to choose between the film directors Fellini and Scorsese. "There's also a piece in there about the over sexualised selling of a lettuce and lots of salad and skin moisturiser going everywhere. People seem to come away from it really laughing."

This Really Is Too Much, Weymouth Bay Theatre, Weymouth College, Tuesday November 27, 7.30pm Go to ticketsource.co.uk/thebaytheatre for tickets. Dorchester Corn Exchange, Dorchester, Wednesday, November 28, 8pm. Call 01305 266926 for tickets or go to dorchesterarts.org.uk