Hot Brown Honey is a combination of entertainment and activism,
Burlesque comedy serves up messages people can laugh with
Hula hoops, hip hop, bare breasts, mature language, burlesque comedy, aerial circus performance and more: all brought to you by six fierce women of colour from Down Under.
They’re Hot Brown Honey, five years into what co-creator Lisa Fa’alafi calls their “world pollination tour,” buzzing into Ontario for the first time this weekend at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, then returning in early April for performances at the Bluma Appel.
The show grew out of a cabaret night Fa’alafi started with several fellow performers. “We wanted to see more brown women doing stuff onstage,” she explains in a phone call from Brisbane. “Anyone could bring their own funny act. It was about us having a space to create any work; we were sick of not having space.”
Buoyed by the success of those cabarets, Fa’alafi co-wrote Hot
Brown Honey with DJ Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers. “The aim was to write something that could infiltrate some of the main stages with our story,” Fa’alafi says. The show has played any number of prestigious venues and festivals including the Sydney Opera House, two successive Edinburgh Festival Fringes (2017 and 2018) and London’s Southbank Centre.
Tammy Fox, executive director of the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, caught the show in Edinburgh last summer and says it “exceeded all my expectations. Hot Brown Honey is unapologetically feminist and decolonializing, and it does all of this with a humour and a boldness and brashness that we rarely get to see on the stage.”
Fa’alafi calls the show a combination of entertainment and activism: “We know that comedy and satire are a great way to break down barriers. If people can laugh with us, then maybe they will hear the messages in our work.” Fa’alafi’s father is from Samoa and her mother is Anglo-Australian; Bowers is from South Africa. They met while making theatre projects with Indigenous communities.
“We felt it unfair that the excellent work that we were doing in theatre was always programmed in ethnic or community programs or platforms. We’d had enough of that.”
The other cast members are of Indigenous Australian, Maori, Tongan and Indonesian/Australian heritage.
The show’s popularity continues, with them booking dates into next year. Meanwhile, Fa’alafi and Bowers are working on a spinoff project, Hive City Legacy, in which they make cabarets with young people in cities where they’ve performed.
“Lots of young women and female-identified people want to have their own platform,” Fa’alafi says. The vision, funding and organization permitting, is to bring these shows together into a “big hive.”
Hot Brown Honey played last January and February in Vancouver and Calgary (“Minus 33, the coldest we’ve ever been,” Fa’alafi recalls of the latter experience). And this tour has them revisiting Vancouver’s Cultch between their two Ontario gigs. “We’re so excited to come back to Canada,” says Fa’alafi, who is prepared for GTA weather: “I’m packing all the stuff I bought here last time.”
Hot Brown Honey is at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre March 8 to 9 (burlingtonpac.ca, 905-681-6000); and at the Bluma Appel Theatre April 5 to 7, presented by TO Live in association with Why Not Theatre and Native Earth Performing Arts (ticketmaster.ca, 1-855-872-7669). Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2