With six more sleeps ‘til Monstrous Beauty Cabaret, I’m starting to get friggin’ excited.
It’s Amber Dawn this is the third time I’ve participated in the Sistahood Cabaret: twice as a performer, and this year as a performer and co-director.
Something very eye-opening happened to me in 2006 when I first stepped onto the Sistahood stage. Let me give you a bit of background . . .
Since 2004, I’ve toured the USA each February with a radical and very controversial performance art show called, The Sex Workers’ Art Show. It is on this tour (and at other equally trangressive venues, such as Mondo Homo Dirty South/ Atlanta, GA) that I really learned to become an uncensored, over-the-top – with love – performer. I also came to believe that if I really wanted to bring the freak to the stage I needed to leave town to do it. In Vancouver I all to often felt like an ugly duckling that does vulgar things on stage that makes her audience wince a little. (Hey, we’ve all have our insecurities, right?)
. . . so as I was saying about 2006. I had just got home from touring and I did my first Sistahood show and realized that I love performing in Vancouver – or at least at Sistahood. This festival is make of hard-working geniuses, who’s art, like mine, isn’t a candy-coated easy swallow.
I give enormous thanks to the Sistahood founders and organizers who have built this house for all of our raw, challenging, political and beautiful art to live inside. It feels great to come home.
And speaking of raw and beautiful, I hope to see a full house at the Cabaret on Friday. We’ve chosen the theme Monstrous Beauty and are taking burlesque back to its roots: as it describes a caricature of women, a hyper exaggeration or grotesque or vulgar parody of womanhood. If you are a thesaurus nerd like me, you’ve most likely seen grotesque and burlesque paired as synonyms.
We’re returning to burlesque’s origins: hyper femininity to the point
of (hopefully) being challenging and thought-provoking to view. An
performative exploration of ways in which femininity is a burden or
vilified or glorified or overdone in this world.
Dig?
