“Hot Brown Honey” is back in Vancouver. After its run last year, it left rave reviews and awestruck audiences. This is an Australian troop of six fiery women, who refuse to be quiet about the inequalities they see. Celebrating and defending those voices that haven’t been heard, from persecuted indigenous communities to repressed and undervalued women everywhere.
Each performer brings a different element of artistry; the beatboxer, the acrobat, the rapper/writer, the singer, the dancer. The performers reclaim their bodies, sexuality and narratives, exclaiming such maxims as ‘You are not the maid’, ‘Don’t touch the hair’, ‘Decolonise and moisturise,’ ‘The revolution can’t begin without childcare’. It defiantly shouts ‘I will neither be a stereotype nor a victim’. This is a bold, bright, and disruptive show.
The staging too is stunning, literally – blinding at times. Stacked luminous yellow “buckets” lined with LED tape reminiscent of a beehive, shimmer with a synchronized light show. Standing atop her dazzling honeycomb pulpit, our neon-clad queen bee preaches her dissident sermon, while her feisty flock do their thing on the stage below.
The central premise of the show is making noise for those that have been silenced, a very worthy theme, but one that is taken to the extreme (while I acknowledge that this has a certain poignant symbolism given the hardship that is being expressed, I would recommend picking up some earplugs on your way into the auditorium). Unfortunately rather than highlighting the issues, I found this sensory onslaught of sound and light desensitizing, drowning out some of the message. In fact, the strongest moments of the show, for me, were the quieter, more pensive ones: A beautiful and awe-inspiring display of aerial silk acrobatics, representing domestic abuse and a relatively sedate, yet incredibly powerful, dance formation dealing with systemic privilege. I feel it would have increased the impact of the show if we’d had more of this balance between moments of context and reflection, and the bombastic spectacle.
This show is loud, proud and unapologetically sensational. While I wholeheartedly salute the sentiment, and was enthralled by the performance, I can’t help feeling disappointed that in this age of polarised, rhetoric politics, there wasn’t more investigation into the context of struggles lived, the whys and the hows of making things better. But maybe that’s a different show.
Get your tickets here!
– MG