About

Playfully jarring together the sensuality of striptease, the zany comic of old cabaret and the academic gender researcher, British Heart is an outre tour de force of male burlesque.  He has worked nationally for corporate and private events groups, producing bespoke exotic acts, at Cabaret evenings and academic symposiums, dinner venues and prestigious festivals in London.   Internationally, British Heart has teased exotic dances in Lisbon and, alternative acts for Japanese celebrities in Tokyo.   This season will see the jet setting British Heart in new York chatting to Tigger, playing In Australia with Mark Winmill’s Brisbane gang and looking to Tokyo for a bit of the tease.

Since his inception on the UK  burlesque scene, winning an award at the Whoopee clubs 2007 male tournament of tease, British Heart has rapidly developed a wide client base who seek the rarities of boylesque.  This has lead him to be the opening boylesquer at the 2009 London Burlesque festival Opening Show, as well as drawing attention from the media, such as interveiws with the Guardian, Unseen TV and writing for Time Out.

British Heart is possibly the only working boylesquer who is openly and daringly engaging with his performance practise as a researcher at PhD level.  He is a board member, researcher and performer for the Central School of Speech and Drama’s burlesque symposuim ‘Kleinkunst’ and has given male striptease lectures to a variety of under graduate students.   Now, fully engaged with problematising boylesque, he questions amongst other topics the sporadic histories of the boylesquers, the reasons and effects of these sexual/sensual male exhibitions in 2009 burlesque and the working praxis of the artists involved.

British Heart leads his career and research with three main shows, The Prime Ministers Mouse, The Suicidal Squid and Brownlaire Hatcher, the pole dancing British Baby.  Each of these shows have utilised British’s past skills as a commercial theatre director, professional performer and designer.  They have layered together bespoke set pieces and costumes, visual theatre techniques, considered choreography and clowning techniques, along with insightful uses of the irreverence, subversion and  the danger burlesque should bring to a venue.

“Striptease remains one of the most vivid forms of live entertainments – outside of simple pornography – that revolves almost completely around the phenomenon of human beings’ watching each other for pleasure” (Shteir, p341)