There aren’t many performance artists who combine great talent, wit, humour and grace with equal aplomb – but Fancy Chance is top of the list. It’s a feat that rightfully earned her the title of Alternative Miss World 2009 at artist Andrew Logan’s legendary excuse for a party that’s been going since 1972, which assesses contestants on their originality, personality and poise.

It’s notoriously hard to impress Alternative Miss World judges – but Fancy, artist Naomi Blume, fashion designer Rachel Freire and artist Alex Wreckage conspired to produce an act where she wore a massive steampunk dress, and was lifted out of it by her hair.

“We were totally surprised, absolutely happy, completely satisfied and really, really tired,” she says of her win. “We all slept  for a couple of days! We did go to Andrew Logan’s the next day and that was really nice – but we were all so skint afterwards we didn’t really do much...”

Today, Fancy is between costume changes at Bizarre’s photoshoot, and sounding deliciously husky thanks to an action-packed Glastonbury the previous weekend. At only 4ft10in, the Korean fireball makes up for her diminutive stature by possessing one of the biggest personalities on the circuit and, though she’s had no formal training, performance and ‘dress-up’ has been in her blood “since forever”.

“As a child I was always the instigator, like: ‘We absolutely need to make up a dance to this song!’” she laughs. “At my fifth birthday party, I forced all my aunts and uncles and everyone to watch me do this dance to my favourite song – Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’. It’s, like, seven minutes long, and about some woman getting shot. I was so in the moment. I don’t even remember the reactions – I just collapsed exhausted into a chair afterwards.”

Now aged 34, she’s still exploring her style: “I’m now delving into performance art and drag cabaret, more than burlesque. I might’ve come to this conclusion earlier if I’d had formal training, but I don’t think I would’ve had the same life experiences to make the decisions I’m making now.”

 

London calling

Born in Korea, Fancy – real name Veronica Thompson – was one of the first wave of babies to be part of the country’s overseas adoption programme and was raised near Seattle, USA. She was always in the band or the choir at high school, but soon left academic life for odd jobs here and there. “I was always participating in strange little films, working at weird internet jobs, travelling, go-go dancing, stripping, bartending... I wasn’t actively performing, but I’d always end up performing,” she explains.

Fancy cut her burlesque teeth at the Fallen Women Follies, Seattle’s “alternative stripping” proto-burlesque night, made up of women in or associated with the sex industry. Then in 2002, Seattle star and Academy Of Burlesque headmistress Miss Indigo Blue invited her to join burlesque cabaret BurlyQ. When Fancy moved to London in 2003, she opened up BurlyQ’s sister troupe with her trademark vim and vigour. “I fired all my guns at people and said ‘Hey! I’m in town!’” she remembers. “I probably lied a whole bunch about how much experience I had, but I managed to get my foot in the door. I was welcomed pretty merrily and started performing everywhere.”

In those days, UK burlesque would only ever be performed as part of a variety night, so when Fancy opened BurlyQ in 2005 at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, the run of six nights was groundbreaking. “I wanted it all to be funny and strange,” she explains, “and for everyone to share their quirkiest, best side. Some of the acts were a bit too long – we were still learning – but it was really successful. We got 1,000 people through the door, at a working men’s club – on a Wednesday! People were allowed to have a ball and a blast.”

The troupe was soon invited to perform at festivals (“2004’s Download was terrible but fucking hilarious – we had bottles thrown at us”) and at 2005’s Latitude festival Fancy met Lucifire and Dave Tusk of the Fire Tusk Pain Proof Circus, of which she’s now a member. “My favourite character at the moment is the new one I play with Fire Tusk – I’m in love with her! She’s a hapless usherette who finds herself auditioning for the circus. Halfway through having knives thrown at her, she faints, clowns up, comes back out and is a loose cannon -– kind of like a five-year-old on speed, but a little more sinister!”

After her first experiences on the festival scene, BurlyQ’s spring and summer beauty pageant piss-takes followed, and last year Fancy hosted Burly Quest, a show that “travelled through time and space”, where the team “made the whole Working Men’s Club look like a jacket potato – we covered the whole thing inside and out with silver fabric!” Fancy’s planning to run another BurlyQ event when she gets the chance.

Now the queen of kook has firmly made London her home. “The first time I visited New York, I breathed a sigh of relief at the amount of people of every colour there were, and how it didn’t matter,” she explains, adding, “Well, it always matters, but it didn’t really matter that much. And London felt the same way to me. I immediately felt really comfortable here, and it’s also here that I found my performing feet. It’s the place where I’m known, it’s where I get work, where I have creative relationships.”

 

Acting funny

Fancy knows she’s a funny creature. “I tried to do ‘beauty’ at one point and it just didn’t work out for me,” she admits, sagely. “It doesn’t suit me! I get jealous sometimes, but I have no real desire for the results of pretty.”

Whether she’s playing a tassel-twirling schoolgirl or crazy diva, there’s always an element of humour involved. Take the act where she pops condom balloons to The Producers tune ‘Springtime For Hitler’, then comes onstage as the Pope. “It’s just fun, ’cause I fucking hate the Pope,” she laughs. “The vile feelings I have for the Pope are almost indescribable. At the end of the day I’m probably agnostic, but I’m an atheist most of the time. I figure life’s not fucking fair, so there’s no fucking God!”

Fancy also says she chooses her battles, treading carefully “so as not to get a brick through the window” – though her send-up of North Korea’s shadowy ruler Kim Jong-il is pretty edgy. “I’m Korean, so I can go there,” she says, recalling one show when she sang ‘Suspicious Minds’ as ‘Kim Jong-ilvis’ to a crowd of 300 stunned punters. Only five of them knew what the hell she was parodying (though the crowd absolutely loved it). “I don’t think many people are clued-up about international politics, even though there’s some crazy fucking dude with half a brain, waving around a nuclear weapon,” she says. “I try to make my work political. I’ll happily take my inspiration from anywhere, but I find that the real news often has more content, more inspiration, to draw from.”

Fancy rarely relaxes (“I’d take a bath if I had one”), though she does read: Johnny Cash’s second autobiography and an Italian Vogue – for the pictures – are by her bed at the moment. Mostly, though, there’s time only to skim the papers. Given a break, the east Londoner would most like to learn either millinery or how to apply zombie make-up, and when asked who she’d most like to work with, hesitates, finally suggesting “Richard O’Brien? I just like weird musicals!” she says of the creator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “And I really like the art of the Chapman Brothers – it’d be really interesting to mix performance with that.”

Fancy loves mixing it up generally – she’s been in a band and is compering the UK Air Guitar Championships final in August. Fancy’s indomitable spirit of fun pervades the Bizarre shoot, and she’s buoyed up, in spite of her tiredness, by the costume changes – first a wedding dress, then her clown look, then the crazy chicken sequence, at the end of which she smashes egg after egg on her head. When it’s time to go, she gleefully kisses everyone goodbye before grabbing her suitcase – she just has time to drop off her stuff at home before heading out for that evening’s show.

Fancy says there are two things about performing that make her happy – the relationships that come out of it, and the occasional magic moment where the result of all her hard work is there, plainly in front of her, as she performs: “It’s like, a drug-high, immediate satisfaction, type of thing! You can sense it from the audience, ’cause they’re laughing or smiling or cheering or whatever they’re doing. And if you’re writing a book, you don’t get that – you get to read reviews but you don’t get someone looking at you and telling you straight afterwards, ‘That was great!’. To see a sea of people smiling, because of what you’re doing, is pretty awesome.”