Hits and misses: La Clique underwhelms rather than wows
There are plenty of highlights but also some lowlights as La Clique returns to HOTA on the Gold Coast.
Circus, comedy, cabaret, burlesque, puppetry and aerial silks – these are all separate and distinct art forms with long and storied histories and traditions. Why one show would seek to bring them together under a single united banner is understandable, but what is one to think when such an endeavour fails so spectacularly?
After a sold-out debut season at the Gold Coast’s HOTA in 2025, La Clique returns for its 2026 season, promising audiences “an outrageous romp … sexy, funny and deliciously risqué, blending acrobatics, eye-popping stunts, scandalous burlesque and raucous comedy … in an exhilarating mix of artistry and mischief designed to captivate from the very first moment to the final bow”.
The ultimate question, then, becomes: what happened?
La Clique 2026 opens not with breathtaking acrobatics or stunts, but with a garish puppetry routine from Canadian performance duo La Decadanse, the first of three throughout the night, which utterly fails to compel. While the intent was surely to enrapture and entertain, the blend of drag-inspired puppets with raucous show tunes is singularly unimpressive and, indeed, grating.
The puppets themselves are garish and bright, comprising large, bulbous, brightly coloured sponge heads and bodies that involve movement and manipulation by the male-female duo behind the act. Each of the performances – by puppets named Slinky and Chica – are clearly meant to be engaging and entertaining but simply feel grating and overly ambitious in both artistic scope and actual execution.
Following the disappointing puppetry comes one of two performances by Jolie Papillon, a burlesque performer allegedly noted for her “exquisite dance artistry and meticulously crafted choreographies”. While her costumes for both routines – the first involved her performing as a gloriously voluminous peacock and the second involved the gratuitous use of a bathtub and water – were impressive, those who have experienced true burlesque mastery, and I allude here to the likes of US burlesque diva Dita von Teese and her entourage of performers, could not have helped but be disappointed by what was displayed onstage.
You might like
Whilst the peacock routine was engaging enough, thanks primarily to Papillon’s quite impressively proficient use of sequinned feathers as a performance apparatus, the bathtub routine was seriously underwhelming.
Gyrating suggestively around a claw-footed bathtub and giving the first three rows of the audience an audacious (and largely unappreciated) face-full of water does not constitute performing the art of burlesque. Burlesque is about physically challenging societal norms of what constitutes the erotic, feminine and sexual, none of which Papillion’s performances did.
Also underwhelming was the eventual trajectory of performances given by tap-dancer Hilton Dennis. A strapping African-American dancer dressed impressively in plaid, his initial performance was inspired by horses and was quite engaging and energising. His tap skills were impressive, as was his sense of timing and execution. It was his return to the stage, however, that was confounding and strange. Having clearly shown himself to be a performer possessed of significant tap-dance skills, La Clique then saw him pivot to merging his tap-dance expertise with using his penis to generate an accompanying soundtrack.
He returned to the stage clad in a dressing gown and wearing a cowboy hat before proceeding to, again, tap-dance to significant effect, before turning his back to the audience and using his penis to slap the microphone. This was repeated several times, to inexplicable uproarious applause from most of the audience, while your reviewer was left confused by this excessively and exploitatively sexual use of a performer obviously possessed of actual tap-dancing skills. I just do not find such crudeness amusing, but it wasn’t the first time that would prove to be the case on this evening.
What I do object to is nudity without context and nudity purely for cheap titillation
Nudity and the use of the body in performance, of course, have a history as long and storied as that of stage, circus and sideshow performance themselves. The important thing to note, of course, is that it must feel appropriate. I am neither conservative nor prudish and nor do I object to nudity in performance. What I do object to, however, is nudity without context and nudity purely for cheap titillation. And that is what Dennis’ second act felt like.
It is also the overall impression left by performer Tara Boom’s first appearance onstage. Whilst her second performance, which involved her skilfully manipulating parasols with her feet while soundtracked by Rhianna’s Umbrella was intriguing enough, her first performance felt astoundingly pointless.
She appeared from her position backstage dressed in a sideshow-alley inspired costume of red-and-white stripes, holding a tray of bags of popcorn, which she proceeded to distribute to the audience. This soon progressed to her taking centre-stage on a small, round podium and strapping an automatic popcorn maker to her head. As the popcorn maker produced popcorn she was thrusting and gyrating, smearing her body in butter and slowly removing all her clothes until she was eventually naked, bouncing kernels of popcorn off her heavily buttered breasts and fully naked lower body.
Subscribe for updates
But to what avail? Whilst the performance inexplicably had most of the audience in stitches, I could not help but wonder what the ultimate point of it was? Were they laughing at the exposed female body, her breasts and genitalia smeared in butter and thrusting against the constant stream of popcorn kernels? It felt pointless, hollow, unassuming and, ultimately, exploitative.
Exploitative is the word best suited to describe La Clique’s ultimate use of Spanish performer David Pereria too. Audiences first met him when he took to the stage to perform an acrobatic silks routine that revealed him to be a dextrous, beautiful and talented performer capable of contorting his body into impressive shapes and using the silks to execute dance moves that ranged from the softly romantic to the quietly powerful.
Why, then, would they not have had him further demonstrate his skills in this area is puzzling indeed. Instead, he reappeared onstage clad only in a bath towel, with a shaving stand as his sole prop. In time he stripped naked, covered his body in shaving cream and proceeded to shave various parts of it while contorting his body in different shapes. Whilst his dexterity was certainly admirable, the routine felt as hollow and exploitative as that which saw Boom strip naked onstage.
The undeniable highlight and success of La Clique 2026 is the inclusion of American sideshow and carnival-inspired performer Heather Holliday. The American sword-swallowing, fire-eating seductress is worth the price of admission alone, and that can only be a good thing given how disappointing the current incarnation of La Clique, as a whole, proves to be.
Holliday may be strictly a stage name for the US performer, but it is one she both embodies and owns wholly and impressively. Holliday has been fascinated by the worlds of circus and sideshow performance since she was a teenager growing up in Manhattan, New York, and has based her routine on the significant skills and experience she both gleaned and honed while working at the city’s famed Coney Island.
Her two sets in La Clique 2026 involve her showcasing her incredibly impressive showgirl persona – figure-hugging garb, fully tattooed body and pin-up girl hair and make-up – while she swallows a gobsmacking array of swords and eats fire.
Particularly intriguing is the section of her sword-eating set where she swallows a large, lit-up sword that illuminates her throat and torso as she swallows it. Likewise, her skills spinning batons that are on fire and swallowing them is tremendously impressive.
She commands the stage magisterially with her diminutive, arresting presence and was, by far, the greatest highlight of the show’s otherwise disappointing and underwhelming Gold Coast opening night performance.
La Clique plays HOTA, Gold Coast, until April 19.
Want to see more stories from InDaily Qld in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily Qld as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily Qld". That's it.
Free to share
This article may be shared online or in print under a Creative Commons licence