Erotic performance

Expect male eroticism pushed to the limit when not burlesque but Boylesque takes to the stage for the Brighton Fringe.

The performer known as BRITish HEart will be performing the show from May 24-26, 10.15-11.15pm each night in the venue known as The Hendrick’s Library of Delightfully Peculiar Writings, a pop-up Victorian-styled library on Jubilee Square, Brighton from May 17-27.

Having started in 2008 as one of the very first male burlesque performers, BRITish HEart – who grew up in Rustington - has gone on to take his love of the performance art into new unexplored territories. Through live performance and his ongoing PhD studies, HEart is continuing to investigate questions surrounding male erotic performance since 1800.

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Over the past four years his distinctive style has seen him perform across the world, headline both the British and Australian burlesque festivals while finding time to teach theatre practice to university students at undergraduate level.

“Current burlesque is a strip-tease performance form, adult strip-tease, but it often uses comedy, parody and satire within it to mock its subjects or itself,” HEart explains. “It is also completely vampiric in that it steals from everyone. It appropriates other forms. Anything goes. Modern burlesque is a jumble.

“Part of the reason for the eroticism is that people were brought up in the age of pornography. They are using that dialect – that very sexual dialect – and they are reversing it back on the audience.

“Let’s look at the male, for example. How are men portrayed in the popular media or pornography? They are usually necessarily wearing a hot pair of boxer shorts and have well-toned bodies.

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“But boylesquers are all different body looks and types. We are going against that typical western male body type that you think of.”

And so will he do the Full Monty? Well, he has done in the past – and is certainly contemplating it (once he’s checked the laws).

“But by the end of the show, I am aiming to take the audience to a place where boylesque is disturbing – in a hilarious way!”