Queer Lady Magician: Revisiting a childhood love of magic with a strong sense of social justice - and a severe case of impostor syndrome.

Queer Lady Magician combines stage magic, storytelling, and other cabaret forms to explore Creatrix Tiara's personal history with magic, examine stage magic through feminist and anti-racist lenses, and confront personal demons around manipulation and self-doubt.

This autobiographical show is Creatrix Tiara’s life and self on stage. She draws on personal experiences of being a lifelong magic enthusiast as well as the politics of being a queer gender-nonconforming immigrant disabled woman of colour.

Our Team

The team behind Queer Lady Magician is your typical lovable band of passionate artists, spanning ethnicities, nationalities, gender identities, sexualities, and abilities. We’ve all come to this show because we’re interested in exploring the intersections between the worlds of stage magic and the worlds of queer feminist political performance art. We revel in the potential for magic to share the truths of our lives in unexpected, thought-provoking ways, instilling a sense of wonder, and expanding our imaginations around what is possible.

Photo by Theodore Murray

Our lead artist and scriptwriter, the titular Queer Lady Magician, is the rabble-rousing writer, producer, activist, media-maker, and performance artist Creatrix Tiara, Creatrix Tiara works with creative arts & media, performance art, technology, games, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. She has built a reputation for creating challenging, catalyzing creative and community work that deals with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, and other identity axes. 

Creatrix Tiara was most recently a Dandy Minion and Burlesque Dancer in Taylor Mac's Helpmann-Award-winning "24 Decades History of Popular Music" at Melbourne Festival, has produced and performed for Melbourne all-disability queer cabaret Quippings and South Asian American women's theatre project Yoni Ki Baat, is a current staff writer for international LGBTQ women's web magazine Autostraddle, and has also worked across Australia and the United States with people and organisations such as Lesbians Incorporated, Freeplay, Global Fund for Women, SF LGBTQ Speakers Bureau, SOMArts, Slutwalk, Center for Sex and Culture, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Vixen Noir, Vulcana Women's Circus, and many more. 

Team Queer Lady Magician also includes:

Cast:

The Assistant: Bradley Storer

The Dancer: Chelsea Bryne

The MC: Sonia Marcon
Special Cameo: Asha Gill

Production team:

Producer: Jaq Avery 

Director: Sharmini Kumar

Stage Manager: Casper Williams

Production Support: Mx Munro

Magic Consultant: Anthony De Masi

Dramaturg: Zeb Direen

Millinery: Ms Fairchild

Costumer: Natasha O'Brien

Props Design: Bryony Stringer

Lighting Designer: Ashleigh Barnett

Fairy Godmother: Mama Alto

The debut production of Queer Lady Magician is produced with the support of Women's Circus as part of their Still I Rise Fringe Mentorship program. As part of the program, Women's Circus provides some seed funding, registration fee for Melbourne Fringe, free use of their rehearsal space and resources, and creative and production mentorship.

Queer Lady Magician has garnered strong community support since its inception, with a dedicated international following on TinyLetter and social media as well as through projects such as the Magic Happens fundraiser hosted by Mama Alto and Mx Munro at Hares & Hyenas in June 2018. While the demand for queer, alternative, feminist takes on magic is strong, garnering funding has been tricky, especially from established institutions such as government grants or philanthropic organisations. 

The success of Queer Lady Magician is no longer reliant on the Powers That Be, from now on: it’s in your hands.

Queer Lady Magician is not about fancy staging or expensive equiptment, but about honest storytelling. Despite this, it is still at its core a magic show, and good magic is worth every dollar.

Our intial goal for this campagin is to cover the costs of venue hire, props, and costumes. We have incredible artists on board, and we want to be able to provide them with the funding to make their work as exciting and creative as possible. 

If we are lucky enough to exceed our initial goal, this funding will be used towards our other necessary production expenses, such as making the show accessible by paying for the hire of Auslan interpreters, paying the talented team behind Queer Lady Magician, and getting the show to as wide an audience as possible through our marketing. 

Our ultimate stretch goal is for Queer Lady Magician to live on beyond Melbourne Fringe 2018. If we are able to cover our costs through this campaign and through ticket sales, any additional funds will be spent on keeping the magic alive and getting the show to all of the people who want to see it.