“Cabaret has always been where the misfits shine, where identity can flicker and reform under the lights, where community builds itself through laughter, defiance, and showing off”
BY LARA CLIFTON, IMAGE BY SCREAMING ALLEY
With theatre lighting, dust becomes glitter. Cabaret and burlesque have been part of my life for as long as I can remember – I’ve never been able to resist the lure of ordinary people creating extraordinary moments in time. These art forms are traditionally born in the cracks: in places where those outside the bourgeoisie and patriarchy – women, queer people, those with unconventional bodies and/or abilities – carve out stage environments for themselves, giving themselves the permissions that the wider world refuses.
I understand burlesque as igniting in the 1860s with Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes – women who broke the previous mould of female performers appearing on stage only to look pretty, if at all. Lydia and co donned shorts and bared legs; they locked eyes with audiences speaking directly to them, joyfully pulling down the fourth wall. Burlesque was bawdy parody: classical masterpieces and stories of royalty might be “burlesqued” – played for laughs by mocking powerful public figures, sometimes by depicting them without clothes. Women cross-dressed, flirted, and insisted on being both funny and sexual on their own terms. The British Blondes stormed America and caused a moral panic doing it. These were working-class arenas where women held comic power and sexual agency long before they won political power – places where the rules were matriarchal, chaotic and, to a modern sensibility, unmistakably queer. As my pal costume historian Amber Butchart notes, Music Hall women were the first in Britain to appear publicly in trousers – their clothing itself a kind of revolt.
A few decades later, over in Montmartre, Paris, another current was brewing. 1880’s Montmartre saw the birth of what we understand as cabaret described by Roger Shattuck as “a playground of fantasy and parody, where everyday identities were constantly being undone.” That undoing, that ability to shapeshift, gender-bend, parody and provoke, travelled directly into Weimar Berlin, with the men at war the cabaret culture there became “a dress rehearsal for modern Western queer life.”(James J. Conway on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex) In those candlelit, permissive rooms, queerness, transgression, satire and sensuality lived side by side. Cabaret became a place where the margins ran the show, and where power was mocked nightly through jokes, bodies, costumes, desire, and defiant visibility.
To my mind, that legacy matters now more than ever. The far right is growing louder – nationally and heartbreakingly close to home, as we’re seeing play out in Kent County Council – politicians are once again trying to police gender expression, sexuality, and the intimate details of our bodies. The familiar targets – women, trans people, queer people – are being pushed back into old cultural battles. When politics starts sniffing around the contents of our pants, cabaret and burlesque become not just entertainment but necessary rebellion. They give queer women and gender-diverse people a way of being fully inside our own skin – and a way to celebrate without shame.
Cabaret has always been where the misfits shine, where identity can flicker and reform under the lights, where community builds itself through laughter, defiance, and showing off. And that is exactly what the Alley Bar is for. In a moment when safe, joyous, queer-centred spaces are disappearing – especially outside big cities – we’re building a haven here in Ramsgate. A place where queer women and gender-diverse people can gather, create, take risks, and take up space. A place that, despite being physically small refuses to feel it. A place where, no matter what the political weather is doing, the dust still turns to glitter.
The Alley Bar will have its official grand opening on Friday 5 December, 7pm screamingalley.co.uk/event-details-registration/bread-pudding-with-violet-malice
As well as a performance by the legendary Diane Chorley on Saturday 6 December, 7pm. screamingalley.co.uk/event-details-registration/down-the-alley-bar-with-diane-chorley
Full details for the 2026 season to be announced soon.
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