Hot Brown Honey

“Welcome to the Hive!” – the hive where women rule and tell their stories fearlessly and noisily. This is a high energy, passion packed performance that plays on the stereotypes and then turns them on their heads to confront and challenge. This is a show, which starts conversations and promotes revolution.

Hot Brown Honey is made up of six brown women from a range of cultures and backgrounds who, when they couldn’t find a space to tell their stories, created their own.  It’s a bawdy, busty, feisty, earthy, energetic, funny, heart-touching and explosive show. Busty Beatz encourages her audience to “Make Noise!” and the hip-hop rhythms pulse through the show and the seats and your body – this is not a quiet show.

Each of the performers tells a story in their own way, whether it’s singing, beat boxing, dancing or hanging from straps, and they each do this superbly. My personal favourite was the heart-touching performance on the straps by Crystal Stacey with its own take on a story of domestic violence; it was both beautiful and poignant.

Hot Brown Honey takes a view that is held publicly and challenges it, so Fa’a’fi’s island woman dance takes the stereotype of the dusky maiden, you know the one, the half-dressed beautiful sexy islander of men’s dreams, and then proceeds to dress her from the ‘fronds’ she has available. The costume reveals and conceals, teases and taunts; it was fabulous and would have the drag queens of my acquaintance reaching for their notebooks.

In a show that touches on cultural awareness, indigenous, gender and sexual politics, there is a lot of laughter, and importantly an underlying recognition from the audience that there is still a way to go before we really do live in a respectful society. Until then, the performance of “Privilege” is still going to hit home and hit home hard.

So Vive La Revolution and Go Hot Brown Honeys – a great show – catch it where and when you can.

Sally Putnam

Photographer: Dylan Evans.