Fowl play

The lighting is low, the decor black-and-red glam, and the bubbly is flowing nicely—even if it’s not quite as good as the label suggests. There’s a small stage, but the action is taking place at the venue’s eight tables. A performer is perched on one, limbs splayed, using her feet to offer the guests chips; a salsa dish is precariously balanced on her crotch (someone must have ordered the “Natcho Snatcho”). At another table, the Wicked Witch of the West is impersonating Robert De Niro—in Spanish. Across the room, a party is enjoying its serving of “Wet Rimming,” in which…well, let’s not spoil it for you.

This is C’est Duckie, a smart, silly, cocktail of cabaret and concept piece—tits-and-teeth showbiz with a deconstructive agenda. “Performance art,” its producers insist, “is the new table dancing.” Taking its name from Duckie, the renowned British queer club night and performance company, C’est Duckie is a menu show with a difference. Each table is given a list of about 30 acts and 40 “Duckie dollars” to purchase them with. Pony up five DD, for instance, and you can “Be Insulted.” “Miss High Leg Kick Does Seven Cocks” will set you back double that. The items are then served up by the four cast members—Marisa Carnesky, Kazuko Hohki, Joshua Sofaer and Miss High Leg Kick—plus guests from the New York scene.

“It’s about performance as commerce,” says Carnesky, whose sets have included flaming magic tricks and being tattooed onstage. “Even though the audience barter with fake money, they treat it as real. It can get confrontational—we have an ‘Emotional Striptease’ section, where we offer to sell a real story from our lives. The audience can be very mean.”

C’est Duckie was created in 2002 as a fancy-pants departure from the troupe’s usual cheap-and-cheerful Saturday nights at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in south London, a grungy pub and queer-performance institution. Like the original Saturday shows, which have been running since 1995, it is deliberately shabby around the edges, and puts the audience­—as well as the performers—on the spot. The sensibility is queer, but Duckie has never been a “gay” enterprise, and the menu show is less about sexuality and more about blurring the lines between business and art, performance and audience. After picking up an Olivier Award and a special theater award from Time Out London in 2003, the show scored two gongs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before touring to Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo. Not bad for an event that began 12 years ago as a way of sprucing up a grotty pub.

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