I love Fringe World and I love Vaudeville so I was really excited to be assigned a shoot as one of the event photographers shooting the Blue Water Vaudeville on my first shift for the 2020 Perth Fringe World Festival.
I’ll admit I didn’t know what to expect from WA’s first after dark, underwater vaudeville show. I photographed the mermaid tank last year but I took along my young children to that. Blue Water Vaudeville is presented by Fliptease the same presenters for the mermaid splash zone but some how I was sensing it was going to be a very different show. I have photographed Fliptease a few times at different events over the past 12 months but they have been aerial acts and what I lovingly refer to as ‘girl in a bubble with fairy lights’ so those shows didn’t give me any insight into what to expect! The show was in the open but it is at Fringe and late at night (10.50pm) and performed by burlesque performers so it literally could have been anything. It’s always fun when you don’t know what you are getting into!
The MC
The MC was fantastic, Lucinda Panties. She was a great mix of funny and sarcastic and interacted beautifully with the crowd. The show started right from the sound check. There was no ‘one, two, testing, one, two’. She was straight in there entertaining the crowd!
La Siren
The first underwater performer was La Siren. La Siren set the scene for the show with a slow routine that started with her shrouded in a beautiful navy veil. This part of the show was actually quite similar to the mermaid show that I had photographed last year in that La Siren was poised and elegant and moved through the water gracefully. There were some element of burlesque that obviously weren’t part of the afternoon mermaid show with kids as the target audience but definitely nothing that would make me consider it to be an ‘after dark’ performance.
Lucy Lovegun
Lucy Lovegun was the second performer of the evening. I’m not sure there could have been two more different performers or performances at the very least! Where La Siren made her entrance slow, poised, and mysterious. Lucy Lovegun emerged from the crowd abusing the performance, cigarette and beer in hand, dressed in flannel and thongs! Lets just say elegant was not the first thought that came to mind.
Lucy Lovegun is a captivating performer who engages well with the crowd every time I’ve seen her perform and this time was no different. The crowd was roaring and cheering.
Bobbie Sox
Bobbie Sox, a male burlesque performer who I again photographed last year at Fringe was the final performer for the micro performance. He arrived as a drunken pirate (which is presumptuous, he may have just been a ‘drinking’ pirate, he may not have hit drunk yet) with eye patch and sash.
Bobbie Sox was probably the most risqué of the three performers in that he ended up with only the bare necessities covered which did lead to an interesting conversation with the people I was with around whether it is more socially acceptable for a man to be in a public space in very little clothing than it is for a woman. In the space of 20 minutes it had gone from a G rating to definitely a PG and perhaps an M rating (ok, probably an M rating!)
The finale
Often with street performers the end of the performance is when the hat gets passed around (or audience members are encouraged to come up and make a contribution for what they have watched). This was a little different. Audience members were invited to throw a coin in the tank and the performers would dive down and retrieve it and any and all contributions would be donated to a charity. I am not 100% sure how it went from throwing a coin in the pool to audience members kissing Bobbie Sox on the butt through the glass, but hey, that’s Fringe for you!
If you want to find out about when you can see Blue Water Vaudeville at Fringe World you can check it out on the Fringe World site. If you want to see more of my photos then please like and follow me on Facebook and/or Instagram.
