Hot & Heavy

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.

Want an invite to the Afterparty? Join this embodied, creative workshop where audiences can explore practical ways to step into climate action, connect with the Melbourne-based climate group - Climate for Change, and find pathways for ongoing involvement in your local area.

Find out more and register for The Afterparty here!

Acknowledgements
The Hot & Heavy Remount in Melbourne is made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, provided through Regional Arts Australia, and administered in Queensland by Flying Arts Alliance. It has received funding from RADF Cairns. The Regional Arts Development Fund is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Cairns Regional Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland. The project is also funded and managed by Shiny Shiny Productions, a queer led, regional production company.

Accessibility

The performances on Thu 22 Jan, Fri 23 Jan and Fri 30 Jan will have an Auslan Performance Interpreter.
The show contains loud music, flashing lights and haze.
The show contains long periods of standing, venue is wheelchair accessible.