Cirrus@Austlit

DAVEYIn Melbourne in the 1990s, a burgeoning ‘queer cabaret’ scene and Dockland parties produced by the ALSO (Alternative Life Style Organisation) Foundation provided regular performances for LGBTQI+ audiences. Fundraisers and fetish club nights, with titles like ‘Libido Unbound’ and ‘Flaunt Your Fetish’ incorporated dance, spoken word, music and drag. These performances articulated developing ideas about lesbian and queer identities, feminist and female subjectivities, and the ‘body’: the status and state of corporeal-ity in the increasingly mediated and corporatised environment. This article takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing upon primary sources including performance texts, and journal entries (autoethnographic record), to examine the cultural currents that were coming together ahead of the Burlesque explosion of the late 1990s–2000s.' (Introduction)

'In 2013 Maude Davey ‘retired’ her nude acts with this powerful and beautiful retrospective. She said it was the last time but, after an overwhelming response here she is, back in the nude again!

'“I laughed, I cried, I trembled, I ached – sublime!”

'A burlesque dissection of Maude’s un-clothed career, My Life in the Nude is a celebration of the corporeal, a queer history lesson and an urgent affirmation of shared humanity all rolled up into two unmissable hours of brutally honest cabaret.' (Production summary)

'A performance meditation about playing god, the economic exploitation of the body, and the capacity to kill.

The situation is either: a laboratory accommodation unit (cage); a prison cell (cage); or the basement of a suburban house in Belgium (cage).

Fundamentally it worries at the question, what is the value of a human life?' (La Mama website)