Club Briefs: The Works

These queer boys from Brisbane have been in and out of Briefs for 16 years. Naturally they’ve come often to Sydney, sporting their saucy mix of drag cabaret and circus erotics at Mardi Gras and frequently in Parramatta for Sydney Festival.

Our amiable drag MC, director Fez Faanana, is a big flamboyant Pacific Islander (if he’s going to be obscene, his Samoan folks back home insist he say he’s Tongan!), and obviously thrilled to be in an historic Spiegeltent set up in a huge bay at Sydney’s Carriageworks.   But Fez is angry at not getting arts funding, or dance opportunities for his performers, or selling enough raffle tickets. Honest chat perhaps, but it makes for some oddly needy and rambling fillers.

To thunderous party music, the circus acts are impressive as buffed boys shed down to  briefs and strappings, pout their arses and spin around and through a high suspended birdcage or splay out from anchored poles. With well-focused lighting and colour, sometimes adorned with drapery, this aerial work while not as breathtaking as expected is certainly beautiful. 

Rowan Thomas, Benjamin Butterfly and Thomas Worrell deserve applause and drag artist Nastia is a charismatic dancer.    

Hilariously, they also demonstrate their mastery of campy contemporary dance (just to show the funding folk they have artistic worth!).  The jokes about ticking the right identity boxes are good fun.

Captain Kidd, dubbed by somewhere the King of Burlesque, is a wild, excessive performer, outlandish as a KISS guitarist, and when suspended artfully from the roof into an ornate birdbath splashing and blowing us with water.

Every week a new guest joins Briefs; in this performance the visiting “superstar” is a young dancer Rhys Lightning who does a little faun dance.   

Briefs is hot and beguiling, lots of tease and fun, but it lacks a cohesive rhythm and build to drive us on through the 75 minutes to a satisfying end.  

Martin Portus 

Photogapher: Prudence Upton