Vancouver International Burlesque Festival's Faye Havoc is here to upend assumptions around "sexiness"
Whether wielding boas or peacock feathers, the ace “Seamstress of Striptease” defies convention
Photo by Tom Gould
Vancouver International Burlesque Festival streams the online Anti-Showcase on May 1 at 7 pm, and the T.I.T. Talks on April 30 at 7 pm
RIGHT FROM THE first number in 2013, burlesque artist and costume designer Faye Havoc has upended notions of sexuality, gender, and striptease tropes.
The now signature act features Havoc morphing from a plain-brown peahen to a fully plumed peacock. But as with so much of the work of the artist featured at this year’s Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, there is much more going on than meets the eye.
“I thought about all the peacock acts out there and it’s all very femme, with women in high heels and corsets,” the artist explains to Stir. “But they’re wearing the plumage of a male bird….I said, ‘What if my peahen is experiencing gender dysphoria?’”
Havoc’s rendition of the act became a journey of self-discovery.
Instead of the traditional “reveal” of the striptease—the removal of pasties—Havoc makes the climax the opening of the tail. All 200 feathers of it. “There’s a dedicated box for it,” says the artist, who’s had to tote it on tours and transit.
Havoc comes at burlesque from a fresh perspective, and not just because of mad costume-making skills. The artist identifies as an asexual—“ace”—a fact that often confounds viewers.
Faye Havoc’s Peacock number. Photo Wet Coast Burlesque
“Why are sexiness and asexuality mutually exclusive?” challenges Havoc. “People seem to think if you’re sexy, you must want to have sex all the time. No!”
In fact, Havoc, who self-describes as “gender chaotic”, was drawn easily into the realm of burlesque. Introduced to it when Havoc began designing costumes, the seamstress extraordinaire would watch with fascination how clients would use the creations on stage.
“I was very drawn to how burlesque artists could be their own production crew—choosing their own music, making their costumes, choreographing their own numbers,” Havoc says.
“Most people say to me, ‘Isn’t burlesque about stripping and being sexy?’ But for me it was very much more about the theatre around it, the glamour, and casting the visuals,” the artist adds. “Because I’m ace, I don’t equate nudity with sex...so it was actually very easy for me.”
And so Havoc developed a unique voice on the scene, blending exquisite costuming—art deco is a favourite era—with a sharp sense of humour and deeper ideas about gender and sex.
Check out the video online for Havoc’s most famous number, “Big Boa”, which competed for Best Debut at the 2017 Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender. In it, Havoc’s ditzy “debutante showgirl type”, outfitted in sparkly lavender pink and a Jean Harlow-style platinum ‘do, stumbles onstage with a small, dollar-store boa—only to find a much more luscious, long boa inside a mysterious gift box. But that larger boa starts to take on a mind of its own, and slapstick ensues between female and increasingly aggressive feather snake. As the music shifts from jazz-age bump-and-grind to Vancouver punk deconstructionists Nomeansno’s “Big Dick”, the laughter becomes more uncomfortable. (See the video below.)
“Boas are phallic objects, there to be teased and played with and stroked,” Havoc observes. “It is about presumptuous men getting up in women’s business, and toxic masculinity, and being dicks to women. It starts taking my clothes off without my consent. It is an analogy for sexual assault and how people feel entitled to touch you if you present a certain way.
“It is funny—I practised falling on my face a couple times,” says Havoc, who does fight choreography and what is essentially puppetry in the piece. “But there’s a metaphor there that’s extremely dark.”
A striptease for the #MeToo moment? Gutsy, comedy-spiked work like that has put Havoc, now known as the “Seamstress of Striptease”, in demand at festivals around North America—only to see the industry, as the artist puts it, “vaporized” in the past year by the pandemic.
That’s why Havoc welcomes the chance to reunite with burlesque besties online at the VIBF.
Havoc appears May 1 in the blow-out Anti-Showcase, an extravaganza of filmed acts that catch a hugely diverse array of performers at home and outside.
In Havoc’s case, look for a new number that riffs on Beast, the antagonist in the dark-fairytale Cartoon Network series Over the Garden Wall. As befits the subject, it takes place in a forest—Everett Crowley Park, to be exact. A little different location than a festival stage, to be sure. Decked out in a shadowy black costume with glowing eyes, Havoc braved mud and rain for the shoot. “I’m a six-foot malevolent forest spirit; we scared a couple of dogs and an entire group of crows,” Havoc says with a laugh. Note that this newest character is also male.
Beast, the character in Havoc’s VIBF work. Photo by David Jacklin
Tune into Havoc’s session at the VIBF’s April 30th’s T.I.T. Talks panel for a deeper dive into the performer’s ideas on how the presence of asexuals in burlesque can teach us about performance, glamour, consent, and assumptions around “sexiness”. The jumping off point of the talk, called Who Framed Jessica Rabbit?: The Unexpected Intersection of Asexuality and Burlesque, is of course the animated bombshell who’s been a longtime inspiration for burlesque acts around the world.
“People either want to be her or be with her, or both,” remarks Havoc, who first became fascinated with the famously voluptuous femme fatale at 10. “She’s so powerful. And a lot of the asexual community consider her to be an asexual icon.”
And so whether it’s with words, possessed boas, or 200 peacock feathers, Havoc is here to, well, play havoc with your stereotypes and presumptions.
“The more I look at it, and I’m very passionate about this, you can’t tell by what someone looks like,” Havoc says. “We can be super-attractive, regardless of our orientation.”
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