The exhibit will run October 28 to 30, featuring a performance on the final day
Photo courtesy of Intrepid Theatre.
From Oct. 28 to 30, Intrepid Theatre will host Vibrant Histories, an exhibit highlighting the history of burlesque and drag in Victoria, with a focus on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) performers.
On the final day of the exhibit, Oct. 30, a burlesque show inspired by the exhibit will take place.
Burlesque is a variety show with striptease and dance, and is often incorporated into drag performances.
Vibrant Histories will also serve as a fundraiser for the Shade Burlesque Festival in 2027, a biannual burlesque festival that showcases BIPOC performers.
House of Cheek, who is organizing the exhibit and show, launched in 2019 with the one-night show, Shade. Cherry Cheeks, the burlesque performer and producer behind Vibrant Histories, said: “I produced Shade because I was basically tired of seeing all or mostly white casts…. [Shade] was Victoria’s first all BIPOC burlesque show at the time.”
Since its debut, Shade has grown into a multi-day festival.
Cheeks said that the Vibrant Histories project began during the pandemic. In burlesque, the generations of performers tend to cycle in every five years, they said. New students enter the scene while cultural shifts, such as the pandemic, may prompt older performers to take a break.
“It moves very fast. During the pandemic, I started documenting what was around me and what I’d seen since I’ve debuted,” which included producers and performers Cheeks worked with, as well as cultural shifts within the community, they said.
Around two or three years ago, Cheeks said they began digging deeper into the burlesque and drag scene in Victoria, curious about how the art form grew and changed over time.
“Back in the day, [burlesque performers] were there as entertainers; your job was to entertain the audience, often seduce the audience,” which was often male-dominated, Cheeks said.
In the 90s, that changed with the Neo-Burlesque movement.
“That’s what we consider burlesque today,” said Cheeks. Neo-Burlesque prioritizes “empowerment” and encourages performers to “do what you want to do in burlesque, make it feel good to you. The audiences are mostly female, or femme, or AFAB people now, and it’s a very openly queer environment now, where most of the performers, most of the audience, exists on the queer spectrum to some degree.”
“I think it’s really easy to feel alone sometimes,” Cheeks said. “I think it’s easy to feel you might be the only or the first person doing something, and so I originally started looking into documenting the local scene, because I found there were so many new producers coming up who thought they were the first people doing something.”
Cheeks said that, while the 2019 Shade production was initially advertised as the first BIPOC burlesque show in Victoria, they now call it the first documented BIPOC show.
“I want to be disproven, because I would love to see who would have done that before me.”
Beyond exploring and documenting the evolution of burlesque in Victoria, Cheeks said that another of the exhibit’s goals is showcasing solidarity.
“I want people to know that any challenges they have in life, maybe it’s identity, or feeling like [they are] the only person in burlesque doing something, or the only person of colour doing something … that there [were] probably [people] before you that were equally doing that work.”
“The same challenges we face today have existed for a long time,” Cheeks said. “You are not alone in that, and it’s that intergenerational strength that I really want to encourage — knowing your history, knowing where we’ve come from, giving people their flowers and honouring people who’ve [done] the work.”
Tickets for the Vibrant Histories show on Oct. 30 are available on the Intrepid Theatre website, and the history exhibit will be available and open from Oct. 28 to 30, with entries by donation.
