Onur Karaozbek and Sheena Miss Demeanour bring the burlesque scene to life in their performance of A Poet and a Dancer at this year’s Sydney Fringe.

Drawing inspiration from the burlesque scene of the 1940s, Onur says the performance is built on collaboration between dance and the spoken word.

“A Poet and a Dancer is a genuine collaboration between me and Sheena. We wanted to go back to the idea of using the spoken word and burlesque that came from San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s.

“There were speakeasies where a poet would come up and start reading the spoken word and there was a cabaret dancer. The sheer randomness of it all was what made it great,” he said.

Onur told me he and Sheena have been working together for a few years, and began to collaborate not long after.

“We met through the burlesque scene here in Sydney. My main work is photography, but I shot one of her performances a couple of years ago and started mixing in my poetry with her dancing.

“We wanted to do a similar thing on a larger scale and we came up with the idea of performing together. We actually did it last year at the Imagine Festival and it was a smaller four or five minute performance.”

Onur said while A Poet and a Dancer draws some of its inspiration from spontaneous movements and interaction between himself and Sheena, there is an overarching theme that comes through during their performance.

“We sort of have an overall idea about relationships, regrets and remorse. It’s about understanding each other and sometimes not understanding each other. There’s a lot of stuff that incorporates the relationship between a man and a woman. I do this through the spoken word and Sheena does it through dance. It’s tapping into the animal instinct that we have. The emotions, feelings and thoughts,” Onur said.

The performance is also inspired by The Beat Generation of the 1940s and 50s.

“The Beat Generation defied the other side of American culture and it affected Europe and the rest of the world. They would write and tell stories. It was a movement where you could think about things differently. These individuals yearned for a different way of life. It started from an artistic movement and went into a philosophy.

“Great jazz artists came out of this generation. It’s based on the idea that right here and right now is what we create. It’s not about rewriting things – that makes it become manufactured. Create and leave and then create some more”

Another element to the performance is video, and Onur uses large installations to add to the setting of the story.

“I’m using video as a backdrop to create a scene. I didn’t want to use props. Why not go to the location you’re talking about and actually film it as the backdrop. It’s playing with a different side of the audience, and it’s about doing things differently,” he said.

A Poet and a Dancer is showing at the Italian Forum Cultural Centre, 23 Norton Street, Leichardt on the 13th and 17th of September at 8.00pm, and on the 19th of September at 6.30pm.

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