The Burlesque Hour is the brainchild of performance artist and writer, Moira Finucane and her partner, theatre creator and director, Jackie Smith.

For most people the term burlesque conjures up images of pin-up girls cheekily strip-teasing out of feathery frocks. But there’s a lot more to burlesque than stripping and The Burlesque Hour has it all. Returning to Canberra for its second season in February, I chatted with the show’s star, the truly charismatic Moira Finucane, about The Burlesque Hour phenomenon and what we can expect to see in the new show.

‘We live together, create together, work together, travel together — it’s a beautiful thing,’ Moira says of the pair’s fifteen-year creative collaboration. They also have twin girls under the age of two. ‘The girls come on tour. They go to sleep and we do the show. It’s tiring but you can do it. I was back on stage and nude, eleven and a half weeks after giving birth — it was surreal and thrilling.’

But it wasn’t always show business for the couple; back in the 1990s, with no theatrical training, Moira was fed up with working hundred hour weeks in a ‘regular’ job when she decided she wanted to be an actress. She auditioned for a play and got the part. She then started performing her unique “burlesque macabre” acts in underground clubs way before the current burlesque revival.

‘Nobody was doing anything like it,’ she says, ‘drag kings hadn’t been invented yet. My Romeo act blew people’s minds.’

She took her acts all over the globe, then one day Moira and Jackie decided to put together an entire show of all the best stuff they’d seen and done in this genre around the world. The idea was to put together a show of completely underground work never seen in the mainstream arts scene, with a collective of talented performers — all with a background in underground queer performance — and present it in an explosive package for everyone to enjoy.

The Burlesque Hour was borne and was different to anything the world had ever seen before, crossing circus with drama, hard core industrial with early opera, the literary gothic with burlesque, and feminist performance art with sideshow to celebrate the complexity and redemptive potential of humanity. The first show sold out and the show has constantly evolved, touring in nine countries, with 27 sell-out seasons, they have performed for over 45 thousand people.
TBH is a visual, audible, sensual feast with something for everyone; it’s provocative but with a great love of humanity.

‘It’ s transgressive and  the audience feels the love — that’s why it’s successful,’ says Finucane ,who adds that although TBH pushes the boundaries of mainstream theatre,  they never set out to shock, ‘If you set out to shock your audience, you are assuming you know more than them.’

That said, TBH will be different to what a lot of the general public — whose only exposure to burlesque may be Dita Von Teese and The Pussycat Dolls — will expect from a “burlesque show”.

Yes, TBH contains nudity, and hot, sexy women, but it’s a variety show with humour, brains and brawn that explores sexuality through the empowering and increasingly popular medium of burlesque: a classical sensibility of art forms that are a grotesque mockery, exaggeration and parody that poke fun at society.

‘There’s a lot of fantastic, gorgeous tassels and tease all around the world and it’s great but it doesn’t stay with me’, Moira explains, ‘It’s rare to see something that can make you laugh and respond sexually, emotionally and politically. All those responses at once is burlesque at its best — if it doesn’t have any grit there ain’t no pearl.’

There’s plenty of grit in The Burlesque Hour; lots of gorgeousness too, but lots of grit.

So are there any new acts in the show?

‘There will be gobsmacking new acts and stars, as well as  old time favourites like ‘Pearls’ and ‘Milk’ — or there would  be a riot,’ she jokes. ‘Guinness World Record hula hooper, Jess Love, will be back with new guest star, Tony Lamond — the 77-year-old “Godmother of Australian variety”.’

Moira describes her own new act as, ‘eight meters of silk chiffon, jet black beads, me naked in high heels and black rain.’

‘The Incredible, weird, wild and beastly Maude Davey is doing a new piece to a Hunters and Collectors classic with a showgirl twist. Yumi Umiumare is doing a piece inspired by the underground dance clubs of Tokyo. There will even be a group routine; a very sexual vampiric piece in crinoline. There will be a few surprises too. A smattering of the old and a dollop of the new all set up in the same gorgeous club style.’

http://www.moirafinucane.com/

Finucane & Smith's Salon of Live Ladies (The Burlesque Hour)

The legendary, indefinable, genre busting, burlesque-eats-its-young Salon that has critics raving and festival audiences around the world in raptures, Salon of Live Ladies is a meteor-shower of provocative, alluring and astonishing Acts by some of the strangest, sweetest, most powerful, most monstrous, most human artists in the world.