This is my review from the January 2014 issue of Sight & Sound of Beth B’s documentary Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, about the NYC alt performance and burlesque scene. It features Bambi the Mermaid, Bunny Love, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Rose Wood, Tigger! and World Famous *BOB* and plays at the ICA […]
Review: Carole J Bufford – Body & Soul, The Crazy Coqs
To the Crazy Coqs in Piccadilly last night to catch the international debut of Carole J. Bufford, a young American songbook performer who hadn’t even left the US before this week. Under artistic director Ruth Leon, Crazy Coqs has rapidly established itself as arguably London’s leading showcase for classical cabaret acts from the States, and as […]
Neo-camp? I think not, dear
“To talk about Camp is…to betray it,” wrote Susan Sontag. Chance would be a fine thing. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking about camp at the ICA’s Notes on Camp panel event on Wednesday night. By rights, it should have been called Notes on Neo-Camp, since it offered ruminations on the recent exhibition of […]
Benefits Street, Secrets of the Living Dolls and the Thatcherite turn in TV documentary
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” It’s one of Margaret Thatcher’s most iconic quotations, even though, in the full context of the 1987 Woman’s Own interview from which it comes, she was actually saying something more nuanced – perhaps even the opposite of the assumed […]
Secrets of the Living Dolls unmasked
So Channel 4’s Secrets of the Living Dolls looks like a whole other thing. Screening tonight, it’s a one-off documentary about female masking, a subculture in which mostly straight men “transform themselves into [female] dolls by squeezing into a second skin” by means of rubber body suits and masks. The doc’s subjects include a 70-year-old […]
Happy Christmas from the Leake St graffiti tunnel
Review: Fascinating Aida – Charm Offensive, Southbank Centre
When you’ve been around for a while, you pick up some moves. Now into their fourth decade of performance, musical comedy trio Fascinating Aïda demonstrate many a nifty turn in their latest run, Charm Offensive, which plays at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall until January 10, following a national tour. Funny, clever and unexpectedly […]
Oklahoma now considers glitter a terror threat
On Friday December 13, four environmental activists with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance were arrested at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a company engaged in fracking and tar-sands extraction of which the Keystone XL pipeline is a major example. Two of them chained themselves to the building’s entrance and two of them unfurled a Hunger Games-inspired […]
Not Television’s top ten cabaret events 2013
Another year down, another heaving goodie bag of cabaret goodness to trawl through in the name of the fool’s errand of selecting the year’s finest. I won’t pretend this is remotely objective or comprehensive – it’s just ten of the moments from 2013 that stand out for me. Let me know the bits you think […]
Jarmania 2014
2014 is the twentieth anniversary of the death of Derek Jarman, one of Britain’s most erudite, esoteric, erotic and exquisite visual artists of recent generations, and as queer as a glittery dildo reading Proust. From Thatcherite satire to reimaginings of Caravaggio and Wittgenstein, videos for Pet Shop Boys to gardening in the shadow of a […]
