Hot & Heavy

The Ironing Maidens are a multi-arts performance project based in Gimuy (Cairns), QLD. They shape their practice through queer feminist and posthuman frameworks. Combining electronic music, projection, movement, humour, and live performance, they create works that reimagine the everyday and open space for playful, critical, and speculative futures. Their 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 at Splendour in the Grass, Fusion Festival (Germany), the Berlin Performance Art Festival, and even in laundromats across regional Queensland and New South Wales.

Hot & Heavy continues their ongoing exploration of sound, domesticity, and performance. Part installation, part performance, and part dance-floor uprising, Hot & Heavy imagines non-binary, de-capitalised, and post-extractive futures through speculative fabulation. The show delivers an immersive aural, visual, and sensory experience that invites audiences to lose themselves, dive deep, and shake free. Within this queer new world, they transform the familiar terrain of domestic life: they hack and reimagine appliances, reframe the horror of human production lines and capitalist consumption, and turn the dance floor into a site of protest, pleasure, and collective power.

Audiences enter 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 pulses at the core of a night that provokes thought, entertains wildly, and engages deeply. Performers and spectators blur together, swept up in the swell of bodies moving en masse, driven by the unifying beat of a broken-down washing machine in the search for utopia.