The Making of a Future Showwoman

This chapter is a reflection of Empress Stah's career so far. She discusses meeting Marisa Carnesky and how this further informed her art. She reflects back on her youth in a rural town and how she never fit the stereotype of what aerial artists looked or acted like. The chapter continues with a callback to one of her shows called Empress Stah in Space for which she did a lot of research into spacecraft and ended up with a laser beam coming from between her buttocks.

Keywords: aerial artist ; anti-normative ; cabaret ; circus ; drag queens ; gender ; heteroqueer ; neo-burlesque ; Peaches ; Robert Pacitti ; SPILL Festival of Performance ; Starlady ; trapeze ; Vaginal Davis ; zero gravity