A One-Woman Revolution with the Audience as Co-Conspirators

Australia’s undisputed Queen of Burlesque is back, and she is inviting audiences to do far more than watch. Imogen Kelly, the internationally crowned Miss Exotic World 2012 and one of the most influential figures in contemporary burlesque, returns to the stage with Strip The Life Fantastic, a genre-defying experience that transforms striptease into a game, memoir into a live choose-your-own-adventure, and spectators into gleeful co-creators. It joins the program for both Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, two of the country’s most beloved celebrations of queer art and culture.

For more than three decades Imogen Kelly has been rewriting the rules of performance, storytelling and erotic subversion. Now she tears up the rulebook entirely. Strip The Life Fantastic is a true-story spectacular that changes every night, shaped in real time by the audience. Through playful challenges, mischievous games and daring choices, the crowd determines which chapters of Kelly’s extraordinary life will be brought to life on stage.

The result is a living, laughing, glitter-drenched collision of autobiography and communal chaos where no two shows are ever the same.

Kelly’s life is a kaleidoscope of defiance, reinvention and art made against the grain. She has always been a performer who refuses to flatten experience into a single narrative. Strip The Life Fantastic embraces that complexity, drawing from a deep vault of personal tales that range from the hilarious to the poignant, the political to the utterly outrageous.

Depending on the crowd’s selections, a performance may uncover childhood secrets, underground queer rebellion, circus mishaps, political activism, or nocturnal adventures from her years as a London club kid in the 1990s. It may reveal her nude wedding in Tokyo, her discovery that she was intersex, her rise to international stardom while becoming a mother, or her fight with breast cancer that tested both her resilience and her artistry. Then again the audience may push the game in an entirely different direction and unlock one of Kelly’s notorious stripteases, choreographed with the wit, theatricality and visual splendour that define her work.

There are too many stories for one night, so the audience has to fight for the ones they want, Kelly explains. They literally build the show. It is a striptease democracy.

This democratic structure is not a gimmick. It reflects the spirit of Kelly’s career, which has always challenged authority, questioned propriety and placed agency in the hands of those who are seldom granted it. By letting the room choose the journey, she turns autobiographical performance into a collective act of curiosity, mischief and community.

STRIP THE LIFE FANTASTIC refuses to sit in a single category. It is part game show, inviting audience members to compete for the stories they want to hear. It is part saucy time machine, whisking spectators through decades of queer nightlife, circus culture, political movements and the global evolution of burlesque. It is also part cultural history, offering an insider’s view of scenes that have often been erased or sanitised.

In Kelly’s hands burlesque becomes a lens through which audiences can understand shifting attitudes about gender, sexuality and bodily autonomy, all while laughing, gasping and cheering at the spectacle unfolding before them. Her approach blends razor-sharp intellect with absurdity, glamour with grit, the personal with the political. It is an experience that respects the intelligence of its audience while asking them to play.

To understand why this show feels unlike anything else on the contemporary stage, it helps to understand the woman behind it. Imogen Kelly’s origins are rooted in Sydney’s late 1980s queer underground, where she emerged as a Kings Cross showgirl at a time when the city’s nightlife was a crucible of artistic experimentation, social rebellion and resistance.

From these beginnings she launched into a global career that has taken her from gypsy circuses to royal engagements, from Berlin clubs to Las Vegas stages. When she was crowned World Queen of Burlesque in 2012 she not only affirmed Australia’s place in the international circuit but also cemented her status as one of the most daring innovators in the form.

Her artistic credentials extend far beyond burlesque. She holds a Masters in Directing from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Performance and a Circus Diploma, all of which fuel her distinctive blend of precise dramaturgy, physical artistry and flamboyant spectacle.

Yet Kelly’s contributions stretch beyond the stage. She has long been a fierce advocate for sex-industry reform, having worked as an AIDS officer and a campaigner for sex workers’ rights. Her activism is grounded in lived experience and a decades-long commitment to bodily autonomy and human dignity. These values run through her art, which has consistently challenged stigma while celebrating pleasure and power.
Today Kelly performs in venues of every scale, from intimate cabaret rooms to the Sydney Opera House where she has shared the stage with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Her ability to move between artistic worlds while remaining unmistakably herself is one of the hallmarks of her career.

Motherhood, intersex identity, global acclaim, political struggle, health battles and artistic triumphs. Few performers have lived a life as rich, contradictory and defiantly joyful as Imogen Kelly. She has survived breast cancer, raised a family, built a legacy and continued to redefine what burlesque can be both in Australia and abroad.

STRIP THE LIFE FANTASTIC is not a retrospective. It is a celebration of a life still in motion, told with humour, tenderness and a brazen delight in the human body’s expressive potential. It honours the past while making something new in every performance.

Most importantly it gives audiences an active role in shaping the experience. They do not sit back and watch a life unfold. They choose it, unlock it and revel in it alongside the artist who lived it.
A revolution dressed in sequins

Imogen Kelly has always been more than a performer. She is a cultural force who helped pioneer an art form in Australia, a storyteller who refuses simplicity and a trailblazer whose influence crosses generations and genres. Strip The Life Fantastic continues that legacy, redefining what autobiographical theatre can be and inviting audiences into a jubilant act of collaboration.
It is burlesque as game, memoir as adventure and history as a shared act of discovery. It is a night built by those in the room and a reminder that storytelling thrives when boundaries dissolve and bodies speak for themselves.

And above all it is a celebration of a life lived at full tilt. In the hands of a revolutionary artist, striptease becomes not only entertainment but a way to understand the world.

 

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MELBOURNE SEASON
The Motley Bauhaus
118 Elgin St, Carlton VIC
31 January & 1 February | 4:00-5:00pm
Tickets: CLICK HERE

SYDNEY SEASON
QTOPIA – The Substation
Taylor Square, Darlinghurst NSW
16 February to 21 February | 8:30-9:30pm
Tickets: CLICK HERE