Ursula Martinez: My Stories, Your Emails, Southbank Centre

This summer sees the return to the Southbank Centre of nakedly ambitious comedian Ursula Martinez. Does the name ring a bell? If so, you might have seen more of her than you realise. 

She’s the queer cabaret artist behind the infamous viral video Hanky Panky: a gloriously cheeky nude magic act performed at the Montreal Comedy Festival in 2007 and subsequently leaked online – without her knowledge. The premise: the classic ‘disappearing hanky’ conjuring trick combined with a slow striptease. The stakes go up as each layer comes off, until eventually there’s nowhere to hide the sleight of hand. 

Given the perfect fusion of intrigue, (eventual) full-frontal nudity, and everything that’s delightful about classic cabaret, it’s no surprise it was one of the most prolific viral videos of that year.

Now, seven years on, Martinez is holding the world to account in a characteristically fearless show that articulates what it is for the whole world to see your private parts without your permission. Nudity has always featured heavily in her cabaret, she says, but in making her audience unwitting and unprepared witnesses to her act, ‘ what I do is the complete opposite of a traditional striptease … [But] put it on the internet, where it can be viewed at the click of a button, it becomes something else entirely.’

My Stories, Your Emails is a cathartic and hilarious exploration of the swathes of online communication Martinez received in the aftermath of the show, ranging from the admiring to the delusional. Executed with her trademark charisma and appetite for the absurd, it’s a bold reclamation of artistic and bodily sovereignty which also packs heavyweight ideas about women’s autonomy over their bodies. To Martinez, body and her act are ‘something whose power and impact came entirely from the fact I was in control.’