The Seattle Erotic Art Festival facilitates many unique platforms for performance art, from grand mainstage performances to smaller, more intimate showcases which blend seamlessly into their surroundings. From unique main stage productions to gloriously unexpected roaming characters, attendees who come to the Festival see and experience performance art they wouldn’t normally access in Seattle.
2017 Performance Director, Jesse Belle-Jones
Jesse Belle-Jones, “The Modern Sexual Intellectual,” is one bluestocking bettie whose edgy antics and sultry grace will leave audiences scratching their heads and panting for more. With her strong dance background and academic approach, Jesse tours as a headliner and produces critically acclaimed burlesque shows across the globe. Her whipsmart acts are packed with tantalizing food for thought served up in a sharp, scintillating style that is guaranteed to keep her on your mind.
Maven of Ambient Magic, Lesley Carmichael
Erotic art is all around you at the Festival… on the stage, on podiums and walls and screens… even right there behind you! Our anonymous troupe will delight you with tiny, surprising performances all around the Festival floor. We are here to share moments with you: hyper-local experiences of love and lust, of beauty, of intensity and consent and connection, of passion and humor. We’ll be just around that corner over there…
Ambient Performance Co-Director, Eva Luna
Eva Luna has been performing and directing erotic performance art for over a decade. She’s passionate about breaking the 4th wall and likes to challenge traditional performance rules in order to strike meaningful connections that make people think. She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Hollywood CA
Sound and Music Directors, Marius Hamilton & Raymond Forbes
2017 Curators of Stage Performances
Boom Boom L’Roux
The Sound of Freedom, burst onto the Seattle burlesque and cabaret scenes. Making her mark as a powerhouse performer and producer, Boom Boom favors a classic approach to Burlesque infused with her own spicy flavor that melts hearts and captivates souls. After spending her early years growing up in NYC, Boom Boom found herself drawn to the arts at an early age. Since her explosive start from the Kindergarten of Burlesque, Boom Boom has been heating up the stages of Seattle with her classic moves and sultry style. Currently, you can find her on and off the stage as a talent buyer and booking agent, Stage Manager at Burlesque Behind the Pink Door, Producer/Performer at Boom Boom L’Roux’s Late Night Revue, Most recently known for her production of the hit show ‘Dear White People – A Performance Exploration of Race’, and an active Independent Performer.
Boom Boom L’Roux’s showcase will be on Saturday, April 29th.
Ms. Briq House
Ms. Briq House is an advocate of sensuality and an experiential instructor of intimacy. You may also know her as a Burlesque Performer, Producer, Emcee and all-around Bad Ass Bitch. With a smile that lights up a room and an ass that won’t quit Ms. Briq House offers something for everyone with her sly, seductive, stripteases. This proud size 16 Queen is the Producer of The Sunday Night Shuga Shaq: An All People of Color Burlesque Revue. You can find her and her production at Theatre off Jackson Monthly and at Crush Bar in Portland quarterly!! The next Seattle show are 2/5, 3/5, 4/2 and 5/7, 2017. Tickets can be purchased on brownpapertickets.com. To keep up with Ms. Briq House and all of her shenanigans please follow her on Instagram/Twitter: Ms.Briqhouse or Facebook: Briq House.
Ms. Briq House’s showcase will be on Saturday, April 29th.
Syniva Whitney
Syniva Whitney has been making performance work that combines dance and acting techniques, cinematic devices and visual art practices on their own and under the project name Gender Tender. They make things that grow from approaching binary systems as palettes and generate experiences rooted in shifting perspectives physically and abstractly, totally inspired by their non-binary, queer, black and multiracial identity. They have shown work in Seattle at Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, Washington Ensemble Theater, the Seattle International Dance Festival, Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival, Gay City Arts and at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival and in Minneapolis at events curated by HIJACK, 20% Theatre Co., The Body Cartography Project and 9×22 Dance Lab. They have danced for kt shores, Paris Hurley and Maureen Whiting Dance Co., and worked as a collaborator and performer with Aniccha Arts and Vanessa DeWolf as well as exhibited their visual art and screened their short films nationally. Syniva holds an MFA in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has studied dance and performance with BeBe Miller, Nancy Stark Smith, Kris Wheeler + Vanessa DeWolf and Stephanie Skura. Their work often features performer Will Courtney, their real life partner, favorite person in general and frequent collaborator.www.syniva.weebly.com
Syniva Whitney’s showcase will be on Friday, April 28th.
The Shanghai Pearl
The Shanghai Pearl is The Tantalizing Temptress from Taipei, Tempestuous Temple of Temptations, and Princess of Pulchritude! Miss Pearl is an internationally renowned burlesque performer and instructor based out of Seattle, Washington. She is celebrated for her extravagant costumes, bawdy humor, sizzling strip-tease, high glamour, and pulchritudinous performances. Miss Pearl travels widely to perform and teach. She has been featured in the New Orleans Burlesque Festival, The New York Burlesque Festival, Boston Burlesque Expo, Tease-O-Rama, Teatro Zinzanni and The Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender. She has headlined as close to home as Portland, Oregon, and as far away as Paris, France. The Shanghai Pearl is proud to be an instructor of burlesque since 2006. She can also be seen in A Wink and A Smile and The Waxie Moon Documentary.
The Shanghai Pearl’s showcase will be on Friday, April 28th.
Special Guest Performer
Midori
Midori is a multidisciplinary artist fascinated with giving shape and texture to emotion, memory, desire, beauty, repulsion, collective memory and subconscious revisions of experience. A Tokyo native and long-time San Franciscan, she’s known for her durational and interactive performances and installations. She’s shown at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Das Arts Amsterdam, Gorilla Gallery Oaxaca Mexico, VN Jaeger & Schwarzwald in Vienna, among others.
Midori will perform “Kimono 2: What We Wear” on Saturday, April 29th.
Our 2017 Ambient Performance Selections
The complete list of performance offerings can be found within the Festival Schedule.
David Cohen and Alyssa Manning
David has performed for SEAF in several dance-related ambient art creations over the past several years. He has been partner dancing for 25 years. Alyssa is an accomplished ballroom dancer (2009 national champion) who loves fusion and swing and also teaches dance locally and internationally. She is eager to perform at SEAF for the first time.
Kace Face
Kace is a gender bending drag thing always looking to give their audience a thrill. They have a background in dance, theatre, modeling and photography. As a genderqueer person, they identify as both genders. My day today representation of myself through style and fashion is a way for me to be my true self.
Lauren Brazell
Lauren Brazell is a creative evocator working as a performer, director, producer and installation artist. She holds a BFA degree in Theater from Cornish College of the Arts and has trained with Freehold Theater, Pratt, Velocity and Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque. She specializes in theatrical experiences that blur the line between viewer and participant, incorporate the use of various mediums, foster empathetic awareness, authenticity and collaboration.
Lumen
Lumen is not a performance artist, though she is a kinesthetic critter and artist who has worked in many mediums over the years. She has been involved peripherally with the kink scene since the early 90’s and has been exploring kink more intimately over the last few years. Two of her greatest kinks are connection and her love of dynamic rope suspension.
Through her partnership with Daddy Bites Hard and other talented riggers, she has found strength and grace where intention and intensity converge. She describes herself as an introvert who is slowly embracing parts of herself that have extrovert flavors and tone. This will be her first time performing at the festival.
Magnificent Marjani
Magnificent Marjani local Seattle native, is armed with the tools and experience for nearly any occasion, special event and bridal makeup. Whether it be fantasy, boudoir, bodypaint, drag or styling MMD can accommodate your makeup needs. Designs by Magnificent specializing in all your beauty needs.
Mary Hubert
Mary Hubert is a freelance director, deviser and producer. You might have seen their work most recently at Northwest Film Forum where they directed Ring, written by Kelleen Conway Blanchard, produced by The Horse in Motion. Other recent directing credits include W O L F, written by Andrew Shanks and performed at the Pocket Theatre, and Girl, a site-specific promenade devised work produced by Annex Theatre. They have also had the opportunity to work with The Seattle Fringe Festival, The Satori Group, OCC, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Seattle Public Theatre, The Seagull Project, The Young Playwrights’ Festival, and On the Boards. Mary is the Finance Director and a co-founder of The Horse in Motion, and the A-List Liaison at Annex Theatre. Next up? ACME at Annex Theatre!
Monera Mason
Monera Mason is a mischief-maker. Her work includes: starting questionable cults with notorious software gurus, writing abstract fiction, catalyzing shenanigans which she deploys on unsuspecting bystanders in the City of Neon.
Natasha Hawthorn
Natasha is an aerial artist and performer, pole dancer, athlete, fitness professional, and small business owner. She has performed on numerous stages in the greater Seattle area on pole and aerial silks, and has competed in several pole completions. Natasha enjoys the freedom of expression pole offers, an opportunity to combine grace and femininity with strength and power.
Ren De
Daddy bites hard is a rigger, rough body player, impact top, among other things, and fluffy sadist (not). He’s also an event organizer, teacher and all around happy poly/kinky human. He has performed rope at Bay Area Rope Exchange SF Folsom 2014 and 2015. MBE 2015, Rope Masters, San Francisco Pride 2015 Leather Alley, and PDX Rated. He has been an instructor in his professional career and has taught at Kinkfest in 2014 and 2015, Summer Spank 2015, and workshops at such places as BSPC, the Southern Oregon Community Center, at his own events and private lessons in the Portland. In his own words ” I’m a grateful advocate of kink and I’m passionate about rope. I want people to learn and grow safely, with risk awareness, while having the experiences of a lifetime.”