Hire Burlesque Performers Melbourne: A 2026 Guide
The first in our Tassel guide for audiences and those who want a bit more sparkle in their lives, today we look how to book the right burlesque performer for your event.
Booking burlesque performers in Melbourne is not just picking a costume off a rack.
Get the right artist and you have an entertained audience through narrative and timing, built on real stagecraft behind every reveal. Get it wrong and you get a nervous amateur reading the room for the first time, on your dime.
Why hire a professional?
Melbourne isn’t ordinary and we don’t do ordinary burlesque. We are home to The Australian Burlesque Weekend, The Festival of Tease and Melbourne Fringe, all offering high quality productions full of established performers. We have the largest burlesque competitions and we are home to a good number of performers who are ranked on the Burlesque top 50. So the bar is set high by people who do this for a living.
That gap between a hobbyist and a professional shows the second the lights go up. A professional has built an act with a beginning, a build and a payoff. They know their own tech rider cold: music cues, lighting, floor type, entrance path. And in a city where most decent venues won't put an uninsured performer on stage, they carry their own public liability cover. It might seem a serious thing to start with, but a safe performance keeps your event safe.
None of that is optional if you're paying for burlesque performers Melbourne audiences will actually remember. It's the line between an act and an accident.
What makes a performer worth booking
The best burlesque isn't a striptease with better lighting. It's a game of anticipation: when to pause, when to smize, when to drop a glove. Musicality and timing separate a performer who holds a room from one who's just moving to a track. Its about understanding what the performer has been booked to do and making sure they bring the right energy to your event.
Costume tells you a lot before the act even starts. Professionals invest in custom Swarovski-encrusted pieces, ostrich feathers and hand-boned corsetry built to move under stage lights, not store-bought sequins. It's a visible signal of how seriously they take the work. Perhaps though you aren’t booking a showgirl, you have a crowd that wants something different and you have booked a performer who is about to deliver a comedy character act that will have your guests in stitches. Every detail of this costume will also be perfectly planned and thought out to ensure that you are getting the best possible act.
Titles help too. A Mx Burlesque Victoria win means an act has already been tested against the sharpest performers and judges in the country. If you're short on time to vet performers yourself, a title is a fast, reliable shortcut.
Choosing your style
Not every event calls for the same act, and this is where most first-time bookers get stuck. Here is your cheat sheet:
Classic burlesque is the golden-era version: feather fans, gloves, a slow reveal set to big-band sound. Good for a corporate gala or anything that wants polish over provocation.
Neo-burlesque is sharper and more political. Pop culture, social commentary, character, costumes that break the rulebook. Good for an audience that wants to be surprised, not soothed.
Boylesque/ Drag kings brings male performers into the mix, with more camp and athleticism, and it's grown fast on the local circuit. A solid way to diversify a line-up.
Cabaret and variety blends burlesque with circus, live vocals or comedy, useful when you need a longer program that doesn't lose energy halfway through.
A CBD corporate gala usually wants classic polish. A hens night in Fitzroy or St Kilda can handle neo-burlesque or boylesque without blinking. For a full night of entertainment, mixing styles keeps the room engaged from open to close.
Most performers will also adapt costume or music to a theme, from a Gatsby night to something stranger, so long as you flag it during booking, not the week of.
Also talk to your booker, we are the professionals and we know all different types of audiences and what does and doesn’t work. Let us do the heavy lifting for your.
Why book through Tassel Events
Plenty of agencies are just a directory. We're not.
We produce The Australian Burlesque Weekend, Mx Burlesque Victoria and The Apprentease Victoria, which means we're not guessing who's good. We're the ones running the stages where Melbourne's performers prove it. That gives us a direct line to the artists actually ready for your event, not just the ones with the best photos or the most instagram likes.
We love making sure that you are entertained and looked after, and we can handle all the requests. Hosting an old Hollywood 60th birthday and want something glamourous and beautiful, or maybe its your cousins x files themed hens party and you want something that will wow and shock the guests. We have it covered.
We also handle the parts most people find stressful: tech riders, run sheets, venue requirements. You get a night that runs the way it's supposed to, without learning any of that yourself.
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Yes. Classic, cabaret or variety acts read as polished and professional, and work well for CBD galas or brand launches. However, most burlesque will involve a level of tease. Make sure to discuss the level of saucy that is appropriate for your audience
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Some seasons are are busy, three to six months is recommended if you want a specific artists.
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Usually yes, with enough notice. Raise what you need early in the booking conversation so that there is time to prepare
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Yes. You'll need a private space for the performer to change and store their costume, plus safe flooring and enough room to move.
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A raised stage is ideal. If your venue doesn't have one, you need a clear, non-slip performance area, with room for props like feather fans. Check the performer's tech rider for exact dimensions.
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Around five to seven minutes for a solo act. For longer entertainment blocks, book multiple performers or a variety show instead of stretching one act.
If you are wanting performers to roam or serve drinks please discuss this with your booking.
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It depends on the artist's standing, set length, training and costume complexity. Title-holders generally cost more. If someone will do it for cheap, they most likely will not have the training and expertise to handle to the job correctly.
Contact a producer directly for a number that matches your event and budget.
The Tassel Ten- Pip Stachio
The Tassel Ten - Pip Stachio
Ten Questions with Pip Stachio, The Apprentease Victoria 2025
5 March 2026
Your February edition of the Tassel Ten is here, slightly delayed but here none the less.
When we decided to start the Tassel Ten it felt right to start with our two winners from 2025, Winter Greene Mx Burlesque Victoria 2025 being our first and here for February we bring you Pip Stachio, The Apprentease Victoria 2025. Offering us a different perspective on burlesque, masculinity and performance.
This delight of a pintsized human waltzed into our lives as part of the Tit Witchez trio in the very early days of Tassel Thursday. The Tassel team howled with laughter as the trio danced about and twirled ties as makeshift members and swept the floor. showcasing silly camp chaos that we didn’t know we so dearly missed. Flash forward more encounters of them on stage and as the resident stand in man when a man was required for an act, when Domino got the message that they wanted to work on a solo, overjoyed would be an understatement.
On more than one occasion we have uttered praises to the clown gods, not those that twist balloons at birthday parties, or live in sewers but those who study human behaviour and interaction and work on how to portray this on stage in ways that feel absurd yet so intrinsically linked to our shared humanity. Pip is one such clown. There is a level of discipline, knowledge, care and generosity that sits behind the performances of this tiny drag king. Captivating feels like an understatement to their stage presence. It’s training, its dedication and its continuous practice and its damn good. Curated chaos in the best possible way. If you have seen Pips award winning Vampire act you will know what precision in performance is and its impossible not to loose your breath in laughter. Its not just laughter though, its a play on gender, on pop culture and society at large and an important one to make in these current times. As artists we should look at how we connect with and audience, what are we saying but also are they entertained. When Pip Stachio is on the stage … you damn well be you are.
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw, The Apprentease Victoria 2025
1. What was the moment you realised burlesque had its hooks in you?
There was some point when working with The Titwitchez where we realised how important burlesque was to our creative, ridiculous, queer expression. For a show in 2021 my dear friend and fellow titwitch encouraged me to ‘play to my strength’ and create a boyband act. I was a boy possessed, making costumes, listening to music on repeat, dancing at bus stops and that thing flowed out of me like hot lava. This was the moment I realised that burlesque could be playing with gender, crescendoing stupidity and taking off my clothes all at the same time and it was something I wasn’t going to stop doing any time soon.
2. Who is your stage persona, and what parts of your every day existence get to be louder onstage?
Pip is someone I am still getting to know as I spend time with many other characters but I like to think of him as a chameleon with some key parts : big heart, big bulge, big play! I am a drag king, a clown and a burlesque performer which means I perform masculinity and boylesque with an eye to finding jokes, theatricality and connection with audience.
My masculinity gets to be louder as Pip. As a small, mostly femme-passing non-binary person in everyday life, playing with masculinity on stage is freeing and cathartic. I get to take up big space, make fun of power structures that I am disadvantaged by and revel in looking silly, something that people raised as women are often taught not to do. Who knew being gross and hilarious publicly would be the thing that gave me gender euphoria? Himbo rights!
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw, The Apprentease Victoria 2025
3. How do you create your acts, what's the starting point of knowing you are onto something?
I always know I am onto something when I can’t stop giggling at what I am creating. I also work very collaboratively so know there’s juice if I am seeking out people to tell what is on my creative mind.
When working on solo, I mostly work from a costume piece and create from there. I analyse how the costume moves, the colours, the way it makes me want to move, the character it evokes and all the ways that character may move. Character, or form as it might be called in clown, is extremely important to what I create and if there is a strong form, it often demands, with great urgency, to be put on stage. So, I know I am onto something when an act starts urgently pounding on my brain.
4. What are the three integral parts to you creating art?
Clown, drag and tease. In the last six months, I have come to realise these are indivisible for Pip, everything the Titwitchez made and most of the other creative work I do. The contact and play of physical comedy and clown is essential in how I connect with an audience and how an act is built. My art is theatrical and often it is deeply foolish. I experimented with making something that was not about gender, and I FAILED. It was an interesting failure and a helpful one because it taught me gender fuck and drag are integral to the art that I love to make, watch and perform. Tease to me is about building tension and having a good payoff whether or not it's about taking clothes off. Tension and release is deeply important to my creative expression across art forms.
5. Costume is power in burlesque, how do you choreograph a reveal that *means* something?
One of the beginnings in my performing career was in standup comedy which means a sense of tension, timing and punchline was there from the beginning (guess who watched Nanette in 2018?). Additionally, in clown and physical comedy we talk a lot about building to crescendo and timing - this is absolutely linked to how I choose to execute reveals. I am always hunting for the choreography and timing that will bring the biggest comedic payoff. In clown, when something just works, or feels right we often use the French word ‘juste’- it is undeniable that the thing must happen, at that time, in that way. I experiment and rework until I find the most ‘juste’ and silliest reveal possible. I ask others to watch and feedback on this too.
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw , Tit Witchez at Tassel Thursday
6. Which act has changed you the most — and why? (can be your own or others)
In 2018 I saw Dudebox by PO PO MO CO and friends in Melbourne Fringe and it was the first time I was introduced to fierce, feminist, queer clowns and physical comedians. There was drag, character comedy, nudity, feral queer madness and big play. I laughed, until I cried. I had never seen anything like it and I knew immediately I just HAD to do that too. This urgency led me directly to learning from PO PO MO CO legends Kimberley Twiner and Lily Fish and seeking out ways to take my clothes off on stage (here entered burlesque). I have not looked back and am so glad that show entirely renovated what I thought comedy and performance could ever be.
7. How does your work challenge ideas about bodies, sexuality, or who gets to take up space?
Being a trans performer, with a body that has not undergone medical transition, that is often read as feminine, there are certain expectations and pressures I face on what I put up on stage and how I present myself. These pressures are indivisible from the hetero-patriarchal capitalist hellfire in which we live. I have written myself a sort of manifesto to ensure I challenge what I am told and continue expressing myself freely, queerly and openly on stage even when it's tough.
Here is some of it :
There are pressures to shave and not have hair. Pubes are essential to my artform and my queer, trans body. I will not remove hair- this is challenging to some.
There are pressures to perform work that is about my trauma or queerness. I fundamentally refuse. I make work that is about gender euphoria, joy and feeling connected. I make work for queer people that is not necessarily about our queerness but about the joy of the body, dance and naivety. If others have fun too, they’re welcome.
I am allowed to be masculine on stage, even if it is not exactly the norm in burlesque, especially in a body that was not assigned it at birth. If I'm feeling down or stuck, I look to drag kings and things. (Eg There is a great zine just published by drag king Johnny Cocksville that addresses the challenges of masculine performance in a much more articulate way than I can here.) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKdbubTeiGoO9vOy_4_KsK9LpYfOcSXv/view?usp=sharing
There are pressures to change or obscure the shape of my body more than my dear body can stand. I have tried to bind and strap and tape my massive honkers down. They refuse and I must agree with them, a big titty drag king is hot. Got a problem with boy boobs? Grow up.
Further to the above, there are pressures to conform to ideals of what my body should look like as a non-binary person. I am trans and I am non-binary no matter what my body looks like and putting it on stage and showing this unapologetically is something I will continue to do even if my relationship to physical/ medical transition changes.
I see my duty as a performer, whether as Pip or in my other work (check out the Brunswick East Entertainment Festival! ), is to ensure my body is fully in play and taking up big theatrical space. Doing this feels radical in our current time. When I watch work like this, I forget about the passage of time, I am immersed and my body dances along with the performer. It is an ancient ritual, it asks us to see each other in the present moment. We are in the sacred relationship of audience and performer, we are in community. We are being asked every day to disconnect from each other, to compete, to compare. The act of storytelling with the body is connective and moving and expressing freely as a performer, allows others to do the same.
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw for Tasselmas
8. What’s the hardest truth burlesque has taught you about yourself?
I simply cannot do it all alone as much as I have tried and I actually don’t need to. A dear mentor, Kimberley Twiner, often says ‘we cannot make this work alone’ and she’s right. I actually need people, I need community, I need to ask for help. Collaboration is everything to me. Ensemble is where I began and what I love. Working alone is fundamentally bad for my brain and I make better art with people, with their support around me and mine around them.
9. What are you itching to create next?
As a multi-genre, multi-arts-practice little fool I am itching to create so many things!
More spaces that drag kings and things can find community, opportunity and solidarity.
New acts! The op shop gods have been delivering some truly wild finds recently so there are some interesting and ridiculous things in the pipeline. A filthy mime pasta-making chef? A ballet boy? A jockey? Lets gooooo!
I am really hoping to create something longer form that pushes my theatrical skills - an hour long narrative vampire mime show is feeling particularly itchy right now!
Photo credit Lord media , Whoop Dee Doo Revue
10. Lets end on inspiration, words of advice for those who might feel a little lost in their art at the moment?
I am saying this as much for myself as others but making things that you want an audience to like, that aren’t for you, will always be unsatisfying. Be undeniably yourself and be a little freak about it, you never know where that will take you.
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw at The Apprentease Victoria 2025
If you are not following Pip Stachio you can on instagram HERE
The Tassel Ten- Winter Greene
The Tassel Ten - Winter Greene
Ten Questions with Mx Burlesque Victoria Winter Green.
30 January 2026
Every month we are going to bring you into the mind of performers we love with a series of questions. We call this The Tassel Ten.
We have known Winter Greene quiet a while, watching from the wings as they took their first steps onto stage, watching their brain cook up wonderful quirky ideas and combine it with their own personal storytelling and strength on stage, and watching as more and more audience members fell and continue to fall in love with them.
Being a producer has allowed us to be present for so many moments of this wonderful performers career. We squealed with delight when they won Mx Burlesque Melbourne in 2023 dazzling with a striptease routine that portrayed a new level of eroticism (and rhinestones) not previously shown by them, we gleefully watched the audience reducing into a panic and be confused at these new feeling towards the usually very silly Winter. Showing incredible versatility and depth, Winter reassured the audience that night that ‘silly Winter’ was still in there as their unique act had the audience in tears of laughter as they debuted their infamous showgirl rat and slinked about the stage to ‘Feeling good’.
Was this the start of their rise? perhaps not, but standing in the back of that audience that night, knowing what was coming was a complete honour as a producer, and friend of this incredible performer.
Winter is someone who on stage who continues to delight and surprise as well as demonstrate a vulnerability and authenticity in performance that we sometimes forget about. Completely mesmerising, I challenge anyone in the room when Winter Greene is on on stage to try to look away, this is not the time for another drink or a pee break, its time to watch them weave their magic.
Mx Burlesque Victoria in 2025 proved to be another milestone that we at Tassel Events are so proud we could facilitate, with a perfectly executed striptease that echoed of the timing and wit of Gene Kelly (if he was a trans masc who striped.) and a unique act so deeply personal that it had a large percentage of the audience in tears, these acts and their recycled jester red carpet outfit earned them not only another sash but the crown and title of Mx Burlesque Victoria 2025.
We could go on forever about Winter Greene, and this is why they are our first participant in The Tassel Ten
1. What was the moment you realised burlesque had its hooks in you?
When I first saw it as an art form at Drawing Straws Burlesque Life Drawing in approx 2014! I had no idea such a rad art form existed until then. What can't it do!
2. Who is your stage persona, and what parts of your every day existence get to be louder onstage?
Winter is like all the problematic D&D characters I ever had mashed together and shoved onto a stage. Bit of a fuckboy, bit of a clown, bit of a douche. But they're not real! Winter has a confidence I don't have in real life. There's traits and expressions I am drawing on from within myself that makes them a character I can find easily in the moment, but it's all an *act*, babey.
Photo credit Alexis D Lea for Mx Burlesque Victoria
3. How do you create your acts, what's the starting point of knowing you are onto something?
It's 70% of the time done by finding a song I like and growing the act from there. If I'm not super inspired by something right at the start of the process then I lose interest too fast - so having a good song to start the process is super helpful. The other 30% of the time it will be built from the visual idea of a costume/character I think will be fun to play with!
4. What are the three integral parts to you creating art?
EXPRESSION, FREEDOM, AND MUSIC. I need all three to work together to be able to create something I am happy to put on a stage
5. Costume is power in burlesque, how do you choreograph a reveal that *means* something?
We're essentially working as a form of mime in burlesque a lot of the time, so meanings will be misinterpreted by audience members basically every time we perform, and that's okay! I think, as long as I am *feeling it* when performing a reveal, any intended meaning is less important than the actual feeling it gives the audience in the moment - even if they have misread my original intention.
Photo credit Shannon J Shaw for The Victorian Burlesque Gala
6. Which act has changed you the most — and why? (can be your own or others)
I remember coming out of lockdown and seeing Whisky Falls' Chimera act for the first time - it struck such a chord in me about the magic and power in existing while not fitting a specific mold. It's an incredible act. I'm always inspired by Whisky!!
7. How does your work challenge ideas about bodies, sexuality, or who gets to take up space?
<gestures broadly at self> Ahahah, but seriously, I am super honoured to have a platform to spotlight (pun intended) transmasculine / non binary bodies on stage. When trans people approach me after a show to say they have been inspired/delighted to see a body that looks like theirs on stage it is genuinely a highlight of my whole life. It's incredibly touching, especially in the times we're in.
Photo credit Alexis D Lea for Mx Burlesque Victoria
8. What’s the hardest truth burlesque has taught you about yourself?
That I am certifiably deranged
9. What are you itching to create next?
TOO MANY THINGS. I would love to make acts with singing, angle grinding, puppetry, wet mess acts, fan acts, chair tricks and so many more (...not all at once) (but not NOT all at once)
10. Lets end on inspiration, words of advice for those who might feel a little lost in their art at the moment?
KEEP GOING, DON'T SHRINK YOUR ART, YOU'VE GOT THIS, I BELIEVE IN YOU
Photo credit 3 Fates Media for Tasselmas 2024
If you are not following Winter Greene you can on instagram HERE