Faye Havoc & Donna Boss Rogers- A Pantomime Horse

Faye Havoc & Donna Boss Rogers - WINNER, Most Comedic - 29th from Burlesque Hall of Fame on Vimeo.

Where do I start with A Pantomime Horse? I'll begin with the end.

The end of this thing is so memorably, twistedly absurd that it almost makes you forget what led up to it, which is itself so absurd that saying something could overpower its absurdity would have been scoffed at 3 minutes before it actually happened.

This act is scored by "Goodbye Horses" by Q. Lazzarus, a song so indelibly linked to a moment in cinema that I would argue few know of it outside the context of Buffalo Bill's dance.  When the titular horse prances onstage, I kept waiting for something completely different than I was seeing to occur, and in anticipating, two things happened. One: I didn't quite register how smooth and well-considered the horse trainers, Faye Havoc and Donna Boss Rogers, choreographed and executed moves with the implicit question, "What would burlesque performed by a horse/centaur actually look like?" and two: I was completely disarmed and left unprepared for what was to come. The first part of this act is really quite breathtaking and lovely in its silliness, with coordination and timing that must have taken weeks, if not months, to coerce that horse to perform properly.

Then everything goes to hell and whatever I was looking for from the choice of "Goodbye Horses" gets yanked out from under me and thrown through a transdimensional portal into The Twilight Zone.

Sometimes things make no sense but are still absolutely wonderful. This is one of those things.