Bio

BRITish HEart (more commonly BRITish TART) is an artist working in cabaret, circus, comedy, dance and burlesque striptease.

After graduating from Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in 1999 with a degree in performing arts (acting) and specializing in directing, BRITish HEart worked in Tokyo as a performer, street entertainer and director for Venus Fort and Fuji TV. Post-Tokyo, HEart went on to direct and perform in various contemporary and alternative performance productions, specialising in physical and visual theatre.

In 2006 HEart received a Masters in Directing from the Central School of Speech and Drama, specializing in emergent, collective, site specific and visual performance. In 2006, HEart, whilst working at the Edinburgh Festival as a director, he was first exposed to a cabaret and burlesque show; the Carousel Cabaret. Or, one might say, Dusty Limits and Missy Malone exposed themselves to him.

Excited, enticed and agitated, he wanted more of this experience, so in 2008 he entered and was one of the winners of the Tournament of Male Tease, a competition set up by Lara Clifton and Julie Cook to generate boylesquers. HEart entered the competition in 2008 and became one of the winners.

Simultaneously, HEart began a PhD research project on boylesque male striptease, a project that investigates, questions and problematises male erotic performance from the 1800s. It examines boylesque as a cultural phenomenon, the meanings of boylesque, the performance processes boylesquers utilize, and the performance practices we use.

From 2008 to the present day HEart has performed world wide: with Tigger and Jonny Porkpie in New York; with Cherry Typhoon in Tokyo; with Foxtrot India in Lisbon’s Casino Lisboa; as headliner for the Australian and London Burlesque Festivals and throughout the UK.

His work is a constant testing, researching, and development of the boylesque/burlesque and erotic performance form. He avidly researches ways to present new erotic forms, he explores the fusion of the comedic and sexual body, he juxtaposes the visual spectacle with the ridiculous, subversive and grotesque and tests this work, often explicitly, in the live encounter with the spectator. He is also a trained pole dancer and chair acrobat and has become a leading figure of boylesque and forms of erotic performance.

As an educator, HEart has taught theatre practice at undergraduate level for over five years. More recently he has given lectures for postgraduate media and photography students on viewing the male body, taught boylesque male striptease in the UK and he has been a board member, researcher and performer for the Central School of Speech and Drama’s burlesque symposium ‘Kleinkunst’.