DELICIOUSLY DIVERGENT
COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD
NOMINATED FOR
Marleston
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How would you describe yourself or your work in one sentence?
Come play with us
Tell us a little about what you do
We're a six-person arts collective emerging from the thriving local burlesque scene
We run three projects - all of which celebrate queer community:
💡Pilot Light 💡
This is our aspiring producer study group where we 'greenlight' a show pitch and provide a new producer with not only funding but a production roadmap and expertise in all the backend administration (insurance, risk assessments, Live Performance award rates, superannuation obligations, branding/marketing etc) from relevant professionals in our community (thanks Technically Delightful, Taco Kuiper & Monty Mishap). We know from experience that learning how to produce is usually a bit of a trial by fire (and finances!), so we thought we'd pool our resources to dampen the flames a touch. The program is completely free to participate in thanks to a generous grant from Lesbians Incorporated Australia
👑The WAPs👑
Our home brand burlesque "competition" is the reason we started DD back in 2023. As extremely neurodivergent new performers, we struggled to focus on one idea long enough to put anything on stage, and thus the WAPs challenge was born: put up a new act in 4 weeks with a budget of only $50 on a provided (silly) theme. Borrowing a framing device from the UK gameshow Taskmaster, these acts are then judged by someone wholly unqualified on absurd criteria for the ultimate prize: The Golden 🐱 (censored for social media). WAPs has become a haven for baby performers to explore their personas in a joyful and deeply silly environment - particularly those who may not feel comfortable on more 'mainstream' stages just yet
🗡️Clueho🗡️
Debuting at Feast Festival 2025, our immersive burlesque murder mystery is our most ambitious project yet! Based around a bespoke table top roleplay game, this show provides a platform for marginalised performers to tell our own queer stories in genres we've traditionally been excluded from. Due to our improvisational structure and rotating cast, we get to apply a queer lens to different murder mystery tropes with a new story every session. Four of our seven stock characters are canonically from underrepresented groups in our industry: Foxglove is a mature performer at the top of their industry, Cardboardeaux is a parent juggling nightlife and babysitting, Pistachio is a femme-coded autistic struggling to break free from a 'manic pixie dream girl' troupe and our femme fatal, Aubergine, is explicitly a SW (censored for social media) highlighting the many contributions from Industry workers to the burlesque scene today. By hiring folks from these demographics to create their own stories, we get to explore the nuisances of these experiences (while playfully murdering each other). We get to play with a cast full of queer villains whose queerness and/or marginalisation is never the reason for their maleficence.
What impact or achievement are you most proud of this year?
While not all of our shows/programs are *explicitly* pitched at queer audiences and performers, the folks that make art with us are overwhelmingly queer, gender diverse, disabled/chronically ill and/or neurodivergent because our collective are also queer, gender diverse, chronically ill and neurodivergent. In the 3 years that we have been producing events, we’ve produced 19 shows inhouse and supported 3 brand new producers to create 2 more through Pilot Light.
While we didn’t collect demographic data for every castmate for every show (Apologies, There's over 80 of them now!), we do have demographic data for 43 of the performers that have graced our stage:
74% identify as LGBTQI+ (n=32)
65% identify as Neurodiverse (n=28)
35% identify as Disabled/Chronically Ill (n=15)
19% identify as low income (n=8)
14% identify as “Mature” (n=6)
7% identify as Migrants or 1st Gen Australians (n=3)
5% identify as BIPOC (n=2)
We didn’t bother to split our gender data collection into cis and trans identities because it just doesn’t factor into casting, but we’ve never done a show without at least one gender non-conforming castmate. Seeing trans bodies celebrated in all their glory warms the very cockles of our souls and providing a stage that feels safe for ALL of our casts to strip on is a crowning achievement of our work.
As for our six-person production team:
All of us identify as LGBTQI+ and neurodiverse
4 of us identify as disabled/chronically ill
3 of us identify as gender diverse
2 of us identify as low income
1 of us identifies as a SWer
We have no demographic data for our audiences but given who is on our stage and behind it, we’d bet they follow a similar trend.
Clueho has a little more of a mainstream audience and through it we get to present a world in which queer stories are part of the default setting, thoroughly unremarkable in a genre that often treats us as aberrant for how we love.
Because we’ve all been broke, we also run a “pay it forward” ticketing scheme on all of our productions in which anyone may sign up to receive unsold seats at no cost. It’s an honour system with no qualifying criteria - all we ask is that participants show up, cheer loud and pay it forward when times are easier (sign up form in our linktree)
As part of our commitment to caring for the roots of our industry, the techs on our team, David Breuker, Sabre De Light & Phoenix Scriver, have agreed to take on a tech trainee for practical experience on our shows moving forward starting this year! This training will be provided free of cost, to anyone who’d like to learn as theatre tech skills are often both expensive and difficult to learn in formal settings.
Why does your work matter to the community?
Queer art made by queer folk matters. Queer joy matters - most of our team are old enough to remember when the only queer stories in mainstream pop culture were mired in an undercurrent of pain and shame. We’re old enough to remember when “queer community” was often grounded in shared trauma. While things are far from perfect, we’ve come a long way and our stage reflects that progress; We get to showcase not only queer bodies but queer gaze and queer self expression.
Burlesque, as an artform, is about celebrating every inch of who you are right now - it is very difficult to be anything other than your true self when you’re dancing in your knickers. To have SO MANY queer folks, neurodivergent folks, and disabled folks trust us enough to keep them safe while they're publicly (almost) nude is a responsibility we don’t take lightly. We’re a pathway into both performance and production for an increasingly wide swathe of our community and we wouldn’t have it any other way <3
What would you like voters to know when voting for you?
We make space to play - for our casts, our audiences and our mentee producers. We make safe places to *try* stuff and, occasionally, mess it up. We make profoundly silly queer art and help others make it too.