From travelling the world as an itinerant adolescent, to working in London fetish clubs as an underage teenager, to performing blood-splattered, one-woman versions of Swan Lake, Syban’s colourful life has so far been dedicated not just to entertaining, but mainly, in her own words, the endless pursuit of “shits and giggles”.

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“None of this is a career for me,” she explains. “It’s never work. I don’t have a website and I don’t have a business card. It’s strange – people and opportunities just always seem to have presented themselves to me. I think perhaps it’s because I’m the same person offstage as I am on it, so what you see is what you get. I suppose you could say I was a born performer.”

And what do you get, exactly? A colourful ball of energy who’s crammed more into her 21 years than most manage in a lifetime. Here’s Syban’s strange and wonderful story…

In the beginning

Born Syban Velardi-Laufer to Italian and Venezuelan parents and raised Jewish, her life was never going to be conventional.

“It’s always been bananas, right from a young age,” she laughs. She spent her formative years in Italy, Israel and London, where she went to school in Chelsea’s ultra-posh Sloane Square – when she wasn’t spending three or four months visiting different countries, that is.

“I think travel is one of the best things you can do,” she enthuses. “My mind was opened up to different cultures and languages, and I spent all my time around grown-ups. I was privileged. To get so much visual stimulation is a great inspiration. Also, my mother is a designer so I was always exposed to creativity from a young age – I experienced theatre, ballet and dancing on a worldwide scale.”

Taking up dance from the age of three, she was the young girl who liked dressing up, but never stopped. An epiphany of sorts came at the age of 12. “I was a quiet child until that point,” she remembers. “Though I liked dressing up and was a Barbie obsessive, I distinctly remember one night when I couldn’t sleep that I had this realisation. I said to myself that I was never going to be quiet again, never going to be boring or mousey or conventional. Since that moment my life has been full of colour and craziness.”

 This ‘craziness’ began in her teens when Syban would turn up at school with pink hair and fairy wings. “I’ve never once been called a freak or a weirdo, though. Or not in a negative way, anyway. I realise that this is rare – a lot of performers on the alternative scene are there because they feel like outcasts,” she says.

“When I was 16 I did a bondage show as an art project. I covered the art studio in plastic bags and tied up my friend, who was dressed up as Catwoman. At that moment the headmistress walked in with a group of parents on an open day… but even then it was, like ‘Oh, and this – this is Syban…’. Even then I existed entirely in my own bubble.”

I was a teen Torture Gardener

While still at school, Syban found herself spending more and more time in the spiritual home of British alt.culture – London’s Camden Town. “I never went through a goth phase as such, but because of my love of outlandish clothing I naturally gravitated towards Camden, where I got a job in a shop,” says Syban.

“But the shop was also a fetish club – I can’t say which because I was underage! So the next thing I knew I was completely dressed up to the nines, working as a ‘walkabout’.”

It wasn’t long before the precocious teen caught the eye of others on the fetish scene. “One night a performer didn’t turn up for a medical show so the people running it said, ‘Syban, you’re crazy, do you want to do it?’ and because I’ve always been reckless I stepped in and did it without much thought.

The next thing I knew they were sticking needles in me from my collar bone to hip. It didn’t hurt at all, and it was at that point that I realised I have an obscenely high pain tolerance. And also because I sew and make all my clothes, needles have always been a part of my life. So it started from there, really.”

Medical performances lead to an interest in rope bondage, which lead to a job at Torture Garden – all still while Syban was 16. “People saw me dressed up around town,” she grins. “They would ask me what I did and I’d say, ‘Er… I’m Syban and I’m fantabulous’ and they’d say, ‘Cool, do you want to come and do a show?’”

If this sounds like dangerous waters for an impressionable teen, then rest assured – Syban claims she’s always had a wise head on her shoulders.

 “I’m aware that bad things can happen out there, but I’ve been self-aware and lucky,” she explains. “I’ve always been aware that drug use can alter the chemicals in the brain, so I’m kind of anti-drugs, to the point where my friends tell me off for being too judgmental. I suspect I produce an unnaturally high level of serotonin as it is and I’ve been told I’m batshit-crazy enough already. Plus, if everyone else is doing something I’m inclined not to do it just to be different.

I can actually hallucinate without drugs anyway, so instead I draw inspiration from the ultra-vivid dreams that I have almost every single night. From these dreams come my characters, my clothes, my poems – everything.”

Tchaikovsky never did this…

Clothes and characters form the basis for all of Syban’s performances today. An 18-month internship at a couture fashion house taught her how to sew and helped shape her shows, which elegantly combine literature, a lifelong love of Salvador Dali, theatre, ballet and dance with skewering, piercing and gore.

Over the past few years Syban V has performed in a range of places – from country estates and churches to the Bizarre Ball and overseas, where her show always provokes a response. “A pretty typical reaction is, ‘What the fuck?’” she laughs mischievously.

“I was doing my zombie show in Athens, which entails me cutting parts of my body off. So I cut my breasts off then eat them, and I cut my head open and eat my brain. I remember looking up and seeing someone masturbating at one side of the crowd, and someone vomiting at the other. That’s a pretty typical reaction.”

Another performance was ‘Pregnant Clown Lady’, a character that came to Syban during a fever after she cut her foot open in Egypt and had an allergic reaction to antibiotics prescribed to her.

“The story of the Pregnant Clown Lady came to me in this weird state,” she explains. “She’s this huge, fucked-up character who drinks and smokes and has broken her body to such an extent that she can’t give birth naturally. So she cuts herself open and pulls her baby out, but her baby is dead – and inside, it’s full of pink rose petals that get blown out into the crowd. I don’t tend to just put on a show – I tell a story.”
 
Perhaps Syban’s most recognisable show is her homage to Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, with added self-skewering and stapling. “Ballet is a huge inspiration and Swan Lake is my favourite story – it has a lot of meaning to me, possibly more than an audience could ever realise,” she says.

“I performed it at Reading festival last year and it was like an out-of-body experience. When you’re piercing yourself you have to elevate yourself above pain, so it all becomes very dream-like and you can watch yourself from the outside. For the first two minutes there was total silence and all these open mouths, but then at the end the whole crowd cheered. That was amazing.”

The crazy scientist

Ask how to categorise her show and Syban is – for the only time – temporarily lost for words. “It’s not burlesque,” she ponders. “And though I do fire stuff and piercing and stapling too, I wouldn’t categorise myself as any of those. I just find it amazing that as a human being you can continually recreate yourself through new characters.

What’s most interesting is people’s reaction to me. Older people might see me on the street and assume I’m deviant or a troublemaker or whatever, but I’m really not like that at all. I’m a very good girl really.”

She’s certainly a one-off though, referring to herself in the third person – “Syban is very happy today” – or littering the conversation with ‘Sybantilisms’ – made-up words to describe fictional creatures or feelings in the fantasy universe in which she immerses herself: ‘Sybantelope’, ‘Sybanticore’, ‘Sybantastistic’ and so forth.

She picked up the stage name Syban V while working for Bizarre friends Lucha Britannia. And though she speaks to Bizarre today through the fog of jetlag after five weeks sleeping on beaches in Venezuela, London is where Syban calls home, and where she’s currently studying fashion at university by day and performing by night. And when she’s not performing she’s up all night being “a crazy little scientist”, working on new clothes and wigs.

“I love London because there are creative things you can do here that you can’t do anywhere else in the world – but it can be toxic and crazy-ass too,” she asserts. “There are two halves to my life: one is all about these intense levels of theatrical creativity, making my own clothes and performing in them, and the other is escaping to the jungle or the beach … or anywhere...”

Tonight she’ll go home and stay up half the night making a cage that’s also a skirt – or possibly vice versa. Either way it’ll be done in her own inimitable style. “There’s no persona here,” she concludes. “For some reason, people just seem to pay me to be myself.

Maybe that’s where the Salvador Dali influence comes in – art wasn’t a job for him, it was who he was. I see my life the same way: I’m a fabricator and a performer at all times. I don’t own a pair of jeans and I’m pretty much anti-Primark and anti-Top Shop. I believe that life’s full of personal choice and it’s up to you to live as wonderful a life as possible if you so choose.”