Party spirit powers Hot Brown Honey—The Remix
Australia’s Quiet Riot takes on colonization, racism, sexism, and gender stereotypes through hip hop, song, story, and a whole lot of laughter
Hot Brown Honey—The Remix.
The Cultch presents Hot Brown Honey—The Remix from September 23 to October 8 at the York Theatre
THE HIT SHOW Hot Brown Honey by Australia’s Quiet Riot started out as a club night, a raucous dance party with performance artists, drag queens, genderfluid B-girls, and circus performers celebrating global First Nations women and women of colour. That was in 2015, and it has gone on to sell out theatres everywhere from Sydney to Edinburgh. The troupe is hellbent on shoving patriarchy aside for matriarchy, decolonizing the world, reinstating Indigenous sovereignty, dismantling systemic racism, and taking on sexism and gender stereotypes, all through party-powered dance, song, storytelling, cabaret, burlesque, hip hop, and humour.
The pandemic gave the crew headed by Kim "Busty Beatz" Bowers (aka the Queen Bee) and Lisa Fa’alafi (the Game Changer) the chance to reflect and revamp the show, and now, Quiet Riot is back with Hot Brown Honey—The Remix. The work has all the crowd-pleasing elements of the original along with fresh, fiery material and three new cast members. The multidisciplinary artists are of Aboriginal Australian, Samoan, Tongan, Māori, Indonesian, and South African backgrounds.
“Our show is joyous rage at centre-stage,” Bowers says in a Zoom interview with Stir, the artist sitting beside Fa’alafi in Dublin, where they’re performing at the Fringe Festival. “We really click into joy mode, and we want to show on stage what it feels like to celebrate ourselves. We should be celebrated more, and we should be celebrated for all the things that we are.”
Bowers and Fa’alafi first developed the show after so many years working in the arts. “We didn’t ever see ourselves represented or reflected,” Bowers says. “We realized there are all these amazing honeys here on the fringes, on the margins, and we need to write ourselves onto centre-stage with the biggest institutions in the world.”
Quiet Riot embraces the term “honey” for its reference to hip-hop culture, the way it underlines the sticky topics the artists address, because the substance is sweet, and for the metaphor of beehive pollination for spreading their message far and wide. “It’s one of my favourite words for sure,” Bowers says. “It just kind of stuck early on.”
With fun at the core of everything Quiet Riot does, comedy is a powerful way to get at serious subject matter. “We make this really entertaining work but have our stories embedded in it,” Fa’alafi says. “In so-called Australia, the discussion around decolonization has become really prevalent because the queen is dead now. People talking about this a lot and talking about what decolonization actually looks like. Sometimes when we can laugh together, then maybe we can be more open to hearing what things are being said.
“There’s still so many barriers still in the way and so much work still to be done. It’s a constant battle, and an everyday back and forth with your own self and with the world around you,” she says, adding with a laugh: “That’s why we’re like, ‘Decolonize; moisturize.’ You’ve gotta take care of yourself.”
The pandemic drove home the power and importance of live performance for Quiet Riot. The co-creators of Hot Brown Honey—The Remix (the pair wrote the show and direct it) point to research suggesting that no matter what a person’s beliefs or values are, at some point during live performance, audience members’ hearts start beating at the same tempo. “We are really drawn to what can happen when we gather,” Fa’alafi says. “Our show is really about the energy that is created when we do gather together and make so much noise together and dance together and, you know, actually cry and laugh.”
In Vancouver, Hot Brown Honey played to sold-out houses at the York Theatre in 2018 and 2019. The Cultch’s executive director, Heather Redfern, describes the piece as “electric” and says that local audiences have been asking to see it again. It feels like a homecoming of sorts to have the troupe back.
“Hot Brown Honey is full of strong emotions and opinions,” Redfern tells Stir. “It doesn't pull any punches. The politics are clear and they are delivered with humour, joy, and hope. The show inspires us to take our power, join it with others, and make real change in a celebratory way.
“The values that are espoused by the show are also the lived values of the company,” she adds. “There are so many aspects that make HBH unique, especially the integrity of the creators in celebrating a range of brown bodies through high charged performance. The energy and spontaneity of the show combined with the rigour of the performances sweeps the audience up and takes them on a crazy ride that gets everyone cheering and dancing at the end.”
The way Fa’alafi puts it, the performers amplify themselves on-stage, transforming into self-righteous superhero versions of their “normal” selves. “We get to say everything we want to say unapologetically. Why should we have to apologize for who we are and what our experiences are?
“Bring your aunties, your sisters, your husbands, your kids,” she adds. “We have that space to party together, make noise together.”
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