JAQI LOVEDAY PASCOE

Jaqi Loveday Pascoe is a writer, dancer, cabaret artist and torch singer – endowed with a unique voice, a fierce intelligence, a dark sense of humour, a reckless libido, a love of provocative performance and a pressing moral argument considered shocking by rather too many.

Born in Sydney, raised in the Anglican church and now an atheist mystic, Jaqi danced with the Australian Ballet, the Queensland Ballet and elsewhere in the ‘80s and early  ‘90s, afterward studying literature and philosophy at the University of Queensland where she won several prizes. While there she began an ongoing exploration of her voice, which has garnered comparisons to Bjork, PJ Harvey, Johnette Napolitano and Annie Lennox. Thereafter Jaqi studied broadly in music, dance, theatre, politics, philosophy, sex and spirituality – throughout and beyond her experiences as a performer, journalist, critic, teacher, traveller, exotic dancer, artists’ model, mystic, lover and lyricist.

Jaqi has written and performed songs, poems and spoken word pieces, as well as new-media-based performance art – she was the Avatar in the 2002 media technology groundbreaker VideoCombustion (see videocombustion.org) at the Performance Space, Sydney. Since 2001 she has gigged around inner Sydney with her bands Fain and Cydneycide, with guitarist Eugene Jiang as the songwriting duo Siren, and more recently as a solo cabaret performer with the support of various artists from her network of collaborators whom she dubbed the Original Cynics. She has created four cabaret-style dinner shows, among them her Nina Simone tribute Young, Gifted and Blue (La Bar, 2002), and The Goddess Project (Bar Me, 2005), a meditation on womanhood and divinity. In October 2009 Jaqi performed Sofarama, her set of edgy lounge classics, at SilverFuture (http://silverfuture.net/), an intimate Berlin bar and local queer haven.

Jaqi writes regularly for Dance Australia magazine and occasionally for The Australian, and her story on life modelling was published in October 2008 Look magazine. In the past she has choreographed dance (including The Nutcracker for Darling Downs Ballet, 1995) and curated a multi-arts event (Sunday Sacraments at the Hotel Hollywood), and from 2001 to 2003 she hosted a monthly open jam session (see tinyrhinos.com), named after the pattern on the door of her Redfern studio. In October 2008 Jaqi premiered excerpts of a new work-in-progress at Bar Broadway, Sydney; currently she is developing this production, while other projects include recording the Sofarama EP and an album of Siren’s original music, 11 Uneasy Pieces.

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