What's On

The future is Hot, the conversation is Heavy

The Ironing Maidens are a multi-arts performance project based in Gimuy (Cairns), QLD, whose practice is shaped by queer feminist and posthuman frameworks. Blending electronic music, projection, movement, humour, and live performance, they create works that reimagine the everyday and make space for playful, critical, and speculative futures. Previous projects include Electro House Wife, A Soap Opera, and their latest work, Hot & Heavy. Since their debut, The Ironing Maidens have toured nationally and internationally for more than a decade, performing everywhere from Splendour in the Grass to Fusion Festival (Germany), the Berlin Performance Art Festival, and in laundromats across regional Queensland and New South Wales. 

Hot & Heavy is the newest iteration in their ongoing exploration of sound, domesticity, and performance. Part installation, part performance, part dance floor uprising, Hot & Heavy is a speculative fabulation that imagines non-binary, de-capitalised, and post-extractive futures. The show is an immersive aural, visual, and sensory experience that invites audiences to lose themselves, to go deep, and to shake free. Within this queer new world, the familiar terrain of domestic life is made strange: appliances are hacked and reimagined, the horror of human production lines and capitalist consumption is reframed, and the dance floor becomes a site of protest, pleasure, and collective power.

Audiences are drawn into a landscape of projected and augmented interiors, where immersive sound design, performance art, aerial movement, dance, and live electronic music converge. The iconic ironing board band becomes the pulsing core of a night that is at once thought-provoking, wildly entertaining, and deeply interactive. Performers and spectators blur into one another, caught in the swell of bodies moving en masse, and the unifying beat of a broken-down washing machine drives the search for utopia.

Audience members describe Hot & Heavy as “a call to action, to shake up, rumble and clear out the system,” “a thought-provoking, at times heart wrenching, innovative and enjoyable production,” and “a cross-generation wake-up call” that transforms the everyday into the extraordinary.

With its blend of spectacle, satire, and sonic immersion, Hot & Heavy invites you into a world where futures are imagined collectively, identities are fluid, and a dance floor can be the starting point of radical change.

Performance opportunity for local dancers to join the experience! Learn and develop choreogrpahy that will be performed as part of the show, from the dancefloor.

Acknowledgements

This project has been commissioned through the Local Giants Program, a partnership between Regional Arts Australia, PAC and Performing Lines, and Cairns Regional Council. Development funded by Regional Arts Australia.

Accessibility

The performance will have an Auslan Performance Interpreter.

The show contains loud music, flashing lights and haze.