Reviewed by Lee Bemrose
Something about this In Flagrante performance at The Butterfly Club intrigued. I Googled. I saw a weird clip with women in G-strings pretending to be horses to the accompaniment of some really quirky music and I thought, this is weird. I like weird; I'm going to check this out.
In Flagrante is basically a dance-based burlesque show celebrating, I think, the empowerment of femininity as well as offering a feminist reply to the idea of sexual fetish. It's a dance group of four artists performing vignettes that vary quite a bit in mood and tone but all celebrate some aspect of what it means to be female, or occasionally deride male perceptions of what it means to be female.
The overall vibe is one of playful sexuality. This is not a pervy show, even though it's wall-to-wall g-strings and boobs. These women are dancers and although there is much eye candy for anyone with a taste for the semi-exposed dancer's body, there is so much going on in the narration that thought is stimulated as much as anything else.
There is much fun to be enjoyed during this showcase. The aforementioned horse/pony fetish piece, which possibly alludes to the outdated saying of a woman being “a fine filly” is just as wonderfully weird on stage as it is in that film clip. The traffic cop is hilarious, as is the can-can piece with its exuberant and cheeky irony. There's a moody and darkly arty piece about binds or holding back, another retro piece based on actual text when ignorance was the voice of what it meant to be a woman and what her duties entailed, this one quite tragic given that it it and others like it were the voice of authority of a bygone time. Bound. Bondage. Bond-age.
Music was varied but as with the performance on stage, always engaging. The music highlight for me was Nick Cave's beautifully brooding Water's Edge. So good.
But the whole thing, all these little stories, it was all so good.
At The Butterfly Club until 21st May 2017.