“There is indeed something radical-feeling about so many different kinds of beauty in one show”
I bought two raffle tickets from a drag queen with a fish bowl; one guy at the front bought, like, 100. Enthusiasm was in excess at last night’s special ‘Club Briefs’ fundraiser, by Briefs Factory, the Leicester Square-based ‘boylesque’ company, to support the Terrence Higgins Trust in honour of World AIDS Day. Performers and audience members alike hollered to show their love for the cause, and the event, which consisted of half-a-dozen high-quality burlesque performances, featuring men and women, and ranging in style from comedic to soaringly acrobatic.
The acts were sexy – boy, were they – and artful. Some poked fun at cultural stereotypes, or played with the audience’s expectations of sex on stage. All the acts played with gender norms in some way or another. As one audience member, James, who welled up with tears during the final act, told me: “It’s reaching the limits of beauty, it’s crossing the lines, it’s defying things. It’s arguing with normal – it’s redefining normal. I’ve never felt normal, but I’ve never had the guts to be that far on the edge of the fringe.”
There is indeed something radical-feeling about so many different kinds of beauty in one show. Each time the curtain parted we cheered for a different skin shade, nation or culture of origin, a different skill, and a different style.
For some, Club Briefs might be a strip tease, for others, a freak show, but for everyone – and it is for everyone – Briefs Factory shows are a celebration of the human body and the personalities, cultures, quirks, and spirits that inhabit it.
Yesterday’s show concluded with a dance party, drag queens and gymnasts and audience members and starched-collar kids from the suburbs jumping and dancing together to techno-pop. Under the strobe lights, everyone was fabulous.
“These boys from Oz are indeed gorgeous, but they could raise the roof if they got their freak on!”
There was a glittery, glitzy, festive buzz in the Leicester Square Spiegeltent last night. Drinks were flowing and people were clearly out to welcome these ‘seriously gorgeous guys from Oz’ and have a good time. We were promised ‘world circus skills, drop dead gorgeous drag, raucous comedy and trademark punkish swagger’ and the audience appetite was keen.
Briefs: Close Encounters opens with a couple of cute and cheeky dance routines, drawing on and camping up old-school twenties and thirties burlesque traditions – top-hatted gents and chorus girls with flirtatious palm fronds – before we are officially welcomed by the fabulous Shivannah, our emcee for the evening. She is a terrific hostess – with the gorgeous combination of warmth, sass and glamour that characterises the best drag – and her improvised interludes provide some of the highlights of the show. Briefs’ overall conceit (reminiscent of Parliament-Funkadelic’s futuristic mothership) is a little chaotic – ‘someone get these guys a dramaturg’ is one of Shivannah’s best asides – but it really doesn’t matter, given the playful nature of the whole event.
That said, a little tightening-up of the mechanics wouldn’t go amiss. The transitions between acts are often unnecessarily clumsy, and there are too many empty-stage moments, which slow down the pace of the evening, particularly in the first half. Part of the fun of this type of show is that the acts come fast and furious, and there should be a slightly frenetic quality to proceedings for the audience to become caught up in. This momentum starts to build in the second half, post-interval, but should have been there from the get-go. It’s true to say, however, that the performers have only had a few days to get a feel for their audience, and things will almost certainly become faster, bigger, bolder and more raucous as time goes on.
The skill and athleticism of the acrobatics – special mention here to some awesome aerial work from Thomas Worrell – is a delight throughout, and, thanks to some splendidly cheeky costume design, there is plenty of sizzle and sauce to please the punters. The ‘magic’ routine was decidedly under par however, and the evening is full of moments that aren’t pushed to their full potential. Shivannah tells us of Briefs’ origins in a little club in Brisbane ten years ago, and it often feels as if the constraints of a small venue and a more parochial crowd -‘the West End of Brisbane is an industrial estate, not the West End of London’ – are still in place. The queerest performance of the night came from Harry Clayton-Wright, who brought a welcome whiff of mild anarchy to proceedings, and there was also a slight edge of danger to Dale Woodbridge-Brown’s Wonderland-inspired rabbit, but all-in-all, despite the dressing, Briefs feels rather safe and old-fashioned.
Captain Kidd performs his LED hula-hoop routine, towards the end of the show, to Die Antwoord’s tune ‘I fink u freeky’:
Sexy boys
Fancy boys
Playboys
Bad boys
I fink u freeky and I like you a lot.
These boys from Oz are indeed gorgeous, but they could raise the roof if they got their freak on!
