Briefs Factory

A warehouse party that refused to end

Briefs started in Brisbane in 2008, not as a company but as a run of warehouse parties thrown by a group of friends. The name came from the format: brief acts, one after another, with the floor staff working the room in not much more than underwear. Fez Fa'anana ran it with his brother Natano Fa'anana and his partner Mark Winmill, and what began as a place to test material hardened, over the following years, into a touring ensemble with a repertoire and a payroll. Fa'anana's drag alter ego Shivannah took the microphone and has held it ever since, half ringmistress and half heckler-in-chief.

The company now trades as Briefs Factory International, describes itself as an Australian creative collective making evocative, irreverent, physical performance, and is represented by the Brisbane production house Cluster Arts. Its self-description is deliberately unlovely - a glitter-bombing circus that mixes drag, boylesque, street politics and circus skills - and Fa'anana has kept returning to the same word for what holds it together. Speaking to the Star Observer in April 2026, he put the collective's survival down to a refusal to grow up: they had, he said, somehow managed to maintain their identity as "these little punk kids", even while running main-stage seasons, touring parties, community programmes and regional outreach.

The shows that built the name

The flagship remains Briefs itself, the show that took the warehouse format onto festival stages and then abroad, to London, Berlin, Edinburgh, Paris and Glastonbury. Around it the company built a catalogue: The Second Coming, Close Encounters, BRED, Dirty Laundry, and Bite Club, which played the Southbank Centre in London and was followed by Bite Club: 2nd Serve, a version built around the singer Sahara Beck and a live band. That last experiment split the critics - several reviewers felt the songs pulled focus from the acrobats and cost the show some of its edge - and it is instructive that the company's own website now files Bite Club, 2nd Serve, BRED, Close Encounters and The Second Coming under productions that are not currently touring.

What is on the books instead is a spread of formats rather than a single flagship. Briefs: The Works and Jealousss are the main-stage shows; Dirty Laundry is the party cabaret, led by Shivannah; Club Briefs is the dance-floor version, where the acts happen around the audience rather than in front of it; Brat's Carnival is the all-ages afternoon show, built from hula hoops, acrobatics and clowning; and Bearded Bingo is exactly what the title says, a bingo game show with a drag host and prizes. The economics of that spread are obvious - one company, one crew, several rooms and several price points - but it also means the acts get recycled and reworked across formats for years.

Jealousss, and a fourteenth Perth summer

The show before the current one was Jealousss, which ran at the Aurora Spiegeltent in Perth's Pleasure Garden until 16 February 2025 - the company's fourteenth season at Fringe World. Built loosely around envy, it was less a themed piece than the usual Briefs sequence with a new coat of paint: burlesque, aerial work, physical comedy and a running argument between the performers about who deserved the spotlight.

Reviewing it for OUTinPerth on 26 January 2025, Graeme Watson gave it five stars and singled out Mark Winmill, working as Captain Kidd inside a giant glass display, Thomas Worrell on aerial, Serenity's acrobatics in stilettos and Louis Briggs on comedy. His summary was affectionate and unillusioned: the show felt loose and unpredictable, madcap mayhem masking some very tightly drilled performances, and while Briefs broke no new ground, they delivered what they do best. That verdict - no new ground, still a good night - has followed the company around for most of a decade.

The Works: opening the glittering archive

Briefs: The Works is the eighteenth-birthday show, and it is explicitly a retrospective. Fa'anana described it as a look back at those eighteen years and a combination of the company's favourite acts, pulled out of what the marketing calls the glittering archives. It opened the year at Fringe World in Perth, running from 21 January to 15 February 2026 at the Ice Cream Factory.

The Perth reception was cooler than usual. In a three-star review published on 25 January 2026, Perth Happenings praised Matthew Pope's burlesque and called Luke Hubbard's gymnastic routine in heels elegant, controlled and mesmerising, with reliable comedy from Dale Woodbridge Brown and a fire act from Kitty Bang Bang. But the reviewer found the show short on the sex appeal and burlesque edge the company is known for, noted that the host was frequently out of breath and stumbled over words, and complained that the pacing was rushed enough to make the whole thing feel like a support act rather than the main event.

It travelled anyway, and travelled well. The Works opened the 2026 Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts on 24 February at the newly renovated Tāwhiri Warehouse in Newtown, Wellington, playing through to 1 March in the festival's fortieth-anniversary year, with tickets at NZ$79 general admission and NZ$69 early bird. From 18 March to 19 April it took up residence at Spiegel Haus in Melbourne, with Shivannah hosting, Winmill as Captain Kidd, Dylan Rodriguez as Serenity, Luke Hubbard as Nastia, Benjamin Butterfly on aerial and Hollywould Star, plus a different guest from the circus and drag communities each week. It was also programmed into the Darwin Festival for its 2026 season in August.

Where the company stands now

After Perth, Wellington, Melbourne and Darwin, the company's 2026 is unusually quiet on its home ground. Brisbane Festival, where Briefs Factory has curated and performed in past years, runs its 2026 programme through September without a Briefs Factory show in it. The company's own calendar page carries no dates at all, only a line saying the collective will be somewhere next and a link out to a social-media directory - a small sign of how the operation actually works, with festival programmers and their box offices doing the scheduling rather than a tour announcement of its own.

What the eighteen-year mark has produced, then, is a working repertory company rather than a single hit. The Works can be cut to a seventy-minute festival slot or stretched into a month-long spiegeltent residency; Club Briefs and Bearded Bingo cover the late-night and low-stakes ends; Brat's Carnival takes the same performers into daytime family programming. The risk, as the Perth notices suggest, is the one that comes with any archive show - that a greatest-hits set is easier to admire than to be surprised by.