July 22, 2023

I am a second-year creative writing postgraduate research student (thesis working title: ‘Reclaiming Cabaret. A Queer Haunted Autoethnography Of Real, Researched And Imagined Stories Of Cabaret Past And Present’). The creative element of my thesis is my autoethnographic novel, Blond Angel, - a queer haunted recollection of my life in a small touring cabaret dance company in Italy between 1980-1986. This exposes the gap in recent dance history, pertaining to British dancers who worked the cabaret nightclubs of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. I also story people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris, bringing the past and present together in a magically real space, where real, researched and imagined lives meet, haunt and interact within my lived experience. The critical reflection evolves the use of the autoethnographic novel as a qualitative research methodology, valuing personal and evocative writing as equal to conventional academic research. This approach resists the patriarchal discourse of traditional academic narratives.