At Ballhaus Berlin, The Velvet Creepers revive the spirit of Weimar cabaret without turning it into a museum piece. Their work is loud, precise, strange and unapologetically queer: a world of aerial bodies, hula hoops, burlesque, drag, song, comedy and performances that understand glamour as a form of resistance.
There is a version of Weimar cabaret that survives mostly as decoration.
Black bob. Smudged eyeliner. Cigarette holder. A piano in a dark corner. Berlin, reduced to a postcard from the 1920s. A time before catastrophe, made harmless by nostalgia.
The Velvet Creepers have no interest in that version.
Their work does not treat Weimar cabaret as a vintage aesthetic to be rented for the evening. It treats it as an unfinished cultural technology: a place where gender could become unstable, where bodies could become excessive, where comedy could carry danger and where art could laugh directly at the people trying to control it.
The company was founded in Berlin in 2018 by Fifi Fantôme and Dunja von K. For seven years, they have staged regular productions at Ballhaus Berlin, building a long-term relationship with one of the city's most storied cabaret venues. Their shows combine circus, burlesque, drag, live music, performance art and comedy. But the point is never simply to pile up spectacle.
The point is to make a room where queer expression is not softened for a mainstream audience.
Cabaret After the Museum
The Velvet Creepers describe their practice as Weimar Cabaret on Acid. It is a good phrase because it does not promise historical accuracy. It promises contamination.
Weimar glamour meets contemporary queer club culture. Vintage silhouettes collide with surreal costumes. The old language of the cabaret stage meets aerial apparatus, hula hoops, gender-bending comedy, body horror, burlesque, absurdity and spectacle. The result is not a revival. It is a mutation.
A quote from TipBerlin describes the company as where Gatsby meets Berghain. The line is useful, but it does not go far enough. Gatsby is still too clean. Berghain is still too famous. The Velvet Creepers are more interested in what happens after the fantasy breaks: when the sequins sweat, the joke cuts too close, the acrobat becomes vulnerable and the body refuses to remain decorative.
That is where cabaret becomes political again.
The Weimar era is often remembered for its sexual openness, queer nightlife and artistic experiment. But that freedom was never neutral or guaranteed. It existed under pressure. It was vulnerable to censorship, reaction and violence. The Velvet Creepers do not need to lecture about this history for it to be felt. Their shows carry its atmosphere: pleasure with consequences, glamour with a knife in it, laughter that knows the room outside may not be safe.
Two Bodies, Many Worlds
At the centre of The Velvet Creepers are two artists who treat the body as a medium of transformation.
Dunja von K is an aerialist, hair suspension artist and internationally recognised hula hoop performer. She holds two Guinness World Records in hula hoop performance and has worked with more than 80 hoops spinning at once. But the number is not the story. The story is what she turns the number into.
Her work uses skill as theatre. The hoop becomes less a prop than a gravitational system. It frames the body, multiplies it, traps it, celebrates it. In hair suspension, the body appears to defy ordinary limits, suspended between spectacle and discomfort, elegance and risk. The performance does not ask the audience to admire athletic mastery from a safe distance. It asks them to sit with the strange feeling of watching a body become both powerful and exposed at the same time.
Fifi Fantôme moves through another set of transformations. Aerial hoop, contemporary dance, burlesque and clowning appear in their repertoire, but they are never separated into neat disciplines. Fifi may arrive as a dark glamazon, a grotesque clown, a seductive creature, a diva, a ghost or a character whose gender changes before the audience has had time to name it.
Their work is theatrical in the full sense of the word. It does not merely show a body. It gives the body a story, a problem, a joke, a wound, a ridiculous ambition. In one moment, the audience may be laughing. In the next, they may be watching something almost too intimate to watch.
That instability is the point.
The Body Is Not Decoration
The Velvet Creepers' press language speaks of body positivity, queer visibility and radical empowerment. These phrases are often used so casually that they lose their force. Here, they have a more material meaning.
Body positivity is not presented as a demand to love every part of yourself at all times. Queer visibility is not reduced to putting a rainbow flag beside a poster. Empowerment is not the clean, polished confidence of a campaign slogan.
Instead, the shows create a space where bodies are allowed to be too much.
Too old. Too young. Too soft. Too loud. Too hairy. Too made up. Too theatrical. Too strange. Too emotional. Too funny. Too sexual. Too uncomfortable for the audience member who arrived expecting an elegant evening of vintage glamour.
This is not the body as aspirational image. It is the body as evidence: of labour, fantasy, desire, fear, humour and survival.
The company's work is rooted in queer expression precisely because queerness has always required people to remake the terms through which they are seen. Drag, burlesque, circus and cabaret all understand this. They know that a costume is not only a disguise. It can be a weapon. A provocation. A way of becoming visible on your own terms.
A Stage Built for Contradiction
The Velvet Creepers have performed at venues and festivals across Europe, including Le Consulat in Paris, Schmidt Theatre in Hamburg, Fusion Festival, Stuttgart Poetry Festival, UNTOLD Festival, Cabaret Bizarre, House of Lunacy, Weisse Maus, Central Kabarett Leipzig, Dark Matter and Babelsberg Filmpark. Fifi Fantôme's work has also appeared at the Berliner Festspiele, Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque, Stockholm Burlesque Festival, the Chicago Art Institute and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
That range matters because it shows what the company is doing structurally. They are not only part of one nightlife micro-scene. They move between theatre, art institutions, festival stages, queer spaces and commercial venues without making the work less weird, less queer or less specific.
Dunja von K's circus practice and Fifi Fantôme's performance language make this movement possible. Both artists understand how to work at scale. They can fill a large stage. They can command a theatre audience. But they also preserve the intimate, unstable energy of cabaret: the feeling that something might go wrong, that the performer might address you directly, that you might be implicated in the joke.
This is one of the most important things cabaret can do. It refuses the passive audience.
A Creepers show does not ask you only to watch. It asks what you find funny. What makes you uncomfortable. Whose body you think is allowed to be desirable. Whose excess reads as art and whose is dismissed as vulgarity.
Why This Matters Now
Berlin likes to describe itself as sexually liberated. But liberation is not a permanent condition. It needs rehearsal.
It needs stages where gender can be played with rather than policed. It needs artists who can make audiences laugh at the rules that organise shame. It needs venues that allow performance to be erotic without making it commercially available. It needs bodies that are not forced to be beautiful in one approved way.
The Velvet Creepers offer all of this, but without turning it into a workshop or a moral lecture.
They do it with a hoop. A wig. A high kick. A suspended body. A bad joke. A perfect song. A moment of burlesque that becomes suddenly sad. A glamorous costume that looks as though it survived both a ballroom and a fire.
The company won the Best Burlesque award at the Spät! Awards in 2026. Dunja von K holds two Guinness World Records. The Creepers' Ballhaus Berlin productions have sold out for years. These facts matter. But they are not the reason to go.
The reason to go is that the shows understand something many cultural institutions forget: entertainment can still be serious, and seriousness can still be fun.
Queer cabaret does not need to ask politely for a place in the city. It has always been part of the city's nervous system.
The Velvet Creepers simply make sure it is still beating.
Before you mark your calendar: always double-check dates, location, and ticket info directly with the organizers.
Even the best promises come with fine print.