Miss High Leg Kick

Olivier Award winning live artist whose work has taken her from intimate cabaret performance to the creation of medium to large-scale outdoor events. Specialising in highly accessible work defined by creative approaches to audience engagement, humour and a love of spectacle.

Francesca Baglione (Miss High Leg Kick) is an established live artist who embraces collaboration and unusual approaches to audience engagement with work characterized by humour, a love of spectacle, dance and a celebration of the everyday.

Francesca has extensive experience of creating medium-large-scale outdoor works (e.g. Fashion Bus – which started as small intimate performance in a bus to outdoor spectacle for Trafalgar Square, GDIF & Edinburgh Fringe for British Council Showcase), and innovative interactive performance theatre pieces (Duckie’s Olivier Award winning C’est Barbican!). Audition Project brought 75 Live Artists onto the Birmingham Hippodrome stage to re-enact A Chorus Line for a “Redux” film plus outdoor participatory events for Without Walls Festival audiences. Promettes sees diverse artists create movable, flexible routines through synchronised dance pieces; Mannequin is spectacle and installations set inside/outside shop windows celebrating forgotten high streets – both examples of continuing Miss High Leg Kick outdoor works which encourages audience engagement with arts events across the UK. Bird Rave sees a diverse team of live artists interpreting bird movements in an interactive “dancefloor ornithology” performance to classic rave music (recently at Southbank Centre). Bird Rave includes online films, podcast, resources packs for early years, live workshops with expert guests.

Currently touring Without Walls supported show Eau de Memoire which explores the rich experiences and memories evoked by smells. Multi-generational artists present live ‘perfumances’ with smell-along fragrances.

Miss High Leg Kick is an Associate Artist of “post-queer performance and events collective” Duckie.

“Miss High Leg Kick extravagantly embodies the crisis of femininity. Her triumphant arrival onstage, greeted by whoops and cheers, generates faith in the perfectibility of the image. For a glorious moment, we are believers in the transcendent power of glamour. Watching her channelling different female identities (Princess Diana, an eighties exercise babe), we believe that we too could conquer nature and channel our own alluring feminine ‘icons’. The early part of the act generates hope in the possibility of self invention. Miss High Leg Kick presents, ‘as the character she represents but is not. This identification with something, unreal, fixed and perfect gratifies her….’ Simone de Beavoir’s description of the woman of fashion in The Second Sex is apt.

Miss Kick seems gratified. That fake/real smile conveys complacency and a hint of nervousness, as well it might. Her fans share this apprehension, knowing by now that disaster always strikes. Literally and metaphorically, Miss Kick will be brought down to earth. The question is not whether this will happen but how. ‘Accidents will happen’ says de Beauvoir. ‘Wine is spilled on the dress; a cigarette burns it..’ In Miss Kick’s canon, the defilement of the image is a moment of glorious slapstick. We laugh uproariously as she tumbles headfirst into a bath of custard. Her ‘pulled together’ aspect offers reassurance that her humiliation was a harmless ‘bit of fun’. We are excused from feeling her pain. That heart-stopping smile defies degradation, while perpetuating it. The tragic heroism of femininity has never been more powerfully conveyed.”

Written by Charlotte Raven.