As A Slow Burlesque makes its world premiere, Van Mei delves into how the show’s kaleidoscope of personas and costume changes challenge societal norms and invite us to embrace the freedom of evolution.

Most animals come out of the womb just once. But we can be born over and over again. Our rebirths are minor or major life events, forged through encounters with one another, through name changes, pronouns, body modifications, clothes, by time, by change and by choice. The world that awaits us when we are small and freshly wet with life is as yet unknown. We too are considered as-yet-unknown beings.

As babies we begin our lives without assigned sex or gender. Just as our spirits are adjusting to the light of the window on earth, these markers are swiftly decided for us by doctors with the ‘right’ type of qualifications. For those of us humans trapped under the rigid legislatory canon of Western colonial ‘science’, this assigns most of us into one of two narrow categories. We are expected to follow the consequential socialisations of this decision rigidly, across the arc of our lives. All that weight to carry on such scant information of what our chromosomes might indicate. From a young age, we enter the door of ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. A door with no other conjunctions, no place and relationship to time.

Everyone has a relationship to gender and everyone’s relationship to gender inevitably evolves over the course of one’s life.

These are facts that Freya Silas Finch knows about intimately as an artist and nonbinary person. Their latest work for Silo Theatre, A Slow Burlesque is determined to play with gender in fun and liberating ways. The show takes the taboo out of the topic of gender exploration, and demonstrates that gender is not something for people to be afraid of. “It’s not this scary freaky thing. Gender is something that’s available to all of us.”

Nowadays people think of burlesque as Christina Aguilera. But I was interested in a show like those early kinds of performers were making, live art work that was quite politically charged.

The work that has been created in A Slow Burlesque has developed in relation to the way Finch’s own life and body have transformed across time. The idea of the show began to take root while they were in clown training at the John Bolton Theatre School. Finch was studying eras of performance across the 19th century including cabaret, vaudeville, and burlesque. They were taught that the beginnings of burlesque had been super avantgarde, and often quite political satire. “Nowadays people think of burlesque as Christina Aguilera. But I was interested in a show like those early kinds of performers were making, live art work that was quite politically charged.”

A lot in life happened in between that seed of an idea, a script and then developing the work into a performance. Years went by as they transformed in who they were, with the idea and show responding in accord. The show was nurtured in development at Mothership NYC in 2022, the same year that Silo Theatre came on board to support the script and staging, when Finch was a Silo Artistic Associate. Sophie Roberts joined as dramaturg, alongside Director Jo Randerson to tease the work out further together, joined by a choreographer and design team.

I’m not trying to get somewhere, or arrive at some final identity where everything will be resolved or definite.

It feels right for a show about gender to have had many versions of itself, so many people involved, and just as many outfit changes. The work sounds out Finch’s own archetypes and timelines, taking personal history into more abstract terrain through absurd comedy, poetic introspection and physical theatre. Voluminous personas appear and reappear in the
performance as a pastiche of past self-identity. There is a punk poet slicking their hair back like James Dean, a diva of past glories in a tulle skirt and floor length blonde wig, a burly figure, a comical wretch in a fur coat. Costumes and characters flirt in and out of one another. The personas who appear on stage are loosely based on “survival masks that I’ve worn in this world as a trans person” says Finch. It strikes me that they’ve arrived at a deeply one-of-a-kind variety show that weaves threads of each self together, not behind.

Neither does A Slow Burlesque attempt to avert the act and art of change away from the audience’s eyes. All of the costume changes happen onstage. I love that these physical transformations are purposefully shown. Finch tells me they’re interested in spotlighting those moments which are usually hidden in the wings, the moments in which an actor is made up, undone and undergoes transformation; where someone moves from one into two, and becomes another being. To them, that’s the show itself. Because of course gender is a performance. It’s one of viewing and being viewed, of shifting in and out of focus. Deepening our relationship to gender is such a tender form of self love where we honour the capacities of our human container, and the infinite potentials held within us. I can sense this love for their past and present selves clearly permeate through the bones of this show.

The idea that gender might offer us other pathways against the structures that seek to categorise and police us is intoxicating.

“I’m not trying to get somewhere, or arrive at some final identity where everything will be resolved or definite,” Finch affirms. They’ve been quoting a section of Maggie Nelson’s influential text The Argonauts to me where Harry Dodge, gender fluid artist and Nelson’s partner, says of his gender identity, “I’m not on my way anywhere”. The sentiment of not trying to follow a fixed journey is refreshing against mainstream media’s tendency to frame transness through the lens of a very specific pathway. It’s a popular story for when trans narratives do appear in cis media, where a person moves directly from A (Assigned X at Birth) to B (Born Into a New Identity They Always Knew They Were). While this story may genuinely be the case for some, it’s not the case for all, nor for Finch themselves. I suspect the dominance of that framework comes from the terrors of the colonial empire wanting to herd and enclose people and gender into a passive relationship, rather than enter a space of active imagination where we are freely able to continually evolve. We can be all/one/both/and/either/or at any given time. “People tend to steer away from the possibility that gender identity could be a choice”, Finch says. Maybe they don’t tell us about those options we have to choose from, because that thought gives us permission to keep evolving into new forms.

The idea that gender might offer us other pathways against the structures that seek to categorise and police us is intoxicating. I relish that inherent sense of freedom. I crave pace like performance, where we are allowed to exist outside of whatever forms of socialisation are categorically dumped on us. I’m not trying to get to any destination in my gender journey either. I imagine that the magic of theatre has a lot of room to provide, both to the makers of the show and for anyone keen to explore the shapes of the selves they have inside. In the space of a dark theatre, a spotlight, a rehearsal room and a dress up box, deviation is exactly what we are entitled to. Finch concurs. “What theatre always gave me as a queer kid growing up, was a place of play. I’d go to high school drama and I could be anyone and everything. It was this complete sense of freedom.”

I dream of a world where we are all free. A world where divergence is the norm. Where we can all be angels, clowns, artists and freaks. Where trans people have healthcare, money in the bank and higher life expectancies. Where there’s a dyke for president, or no U.S. president at all. Where cisgender folks can truly exist as free beings, because once cis people realise they’re as trapped as we are by these systems, it’s game over on propaganda. Corporations would collapse around us. We were born to be free animals, not to feel trapped inside of our skins. Who denied us the right to exist in our bodies as complicated beings? I feel really grateful for this show and its shared heartbeats, circulating liberatory ideas against the punitive biased systems that continue to harm trans and cis people alike. I’m grateful for theatre, for giving us the chance to inhabit different worlds. And to the makers of this work, for shining a vivid light on the different rhythms, challenges, curiosity, endless play and joy that our interior worlds contain, not just the cages we’ve inherited.