Alice has been supported using public funding by the National

Lottery through Arts Council England - www.artscouncil.org.uk

Alice d'Lumiere is a Performance Artist, Poet, Comedienne and occasional Burlesque Dancer / Aerialist. Alice is also Genderfluid, (MtoF Trans). Alice has been a regular performer on the Colchester Arts scene since 2013; she was a frequent compere for both boutique Night Club “Tea & Sympathy” and the Secret Vintage Fair. She is also a cabaret performer at Steampunk events across the country, but probably best known in her native East Anglia as a Performance Poet and cabaret hostess, who also performs both stage and close-up magic. Alice is also one of the founder members of magic collective Nothing Up Our Sleeves.

In 2017 Alice premiered an original one person show with Truelove Tours Theatre Company; the culmination of a year’s worth of eccentric adventures in cross-dressing, role reversal and stepping through the Looking Glass of Gender. “Illuminating Alice” was a co-commission between COLCHESTER ARTS CENTRE and NORWICH ARTS CENTRE. Supported by Arts Council England, the show was Alice’s first truly personal piece; aiming to explore the question of how real are the people we see in the mirror; part intimate testament, part narrative cabaret; containing dynamic wordplay, Lewis Carroll imagery and just a touch of Burlesque.

Alice has also been a regular performer and compere for Colchester Pride since its inception in 2017. In 2018 she joined the Pride committee and helped steer the event into 2019. She remained with CP until 2021; becoming its Lead Event Coordinator for that year’s event. She stepped down from the Colchester Pride committee in 2021 to focus on her own performance work, but has remained a regular performer at the event.

A proud East Anglian Alice has also performed at Norwich Pride from 2017 and at Reading Pride in 2024.

In 2018 Alice began work on her second full length show; "Speaking Out and Fitting In!" a work in verse and linking prose, with flashes of cabaret and aerial performance. Through this work, Alice explores the wonderful and occasionally counter-intuitive, position of the trans-gender / gender-fluid individual striving to both fit in to another gender, whilst at the same time needing to establish a unique, personal voice for themselves. The show was also ACE funded and commissioned by Colchester and Norwich Arts Centres, but developed over 2018-19 in a more modular fashion; through a series of scratch nights at a variety of amazing venues, including, Battersea Arts Centre, Poplar Union, Cambridge Junction and The Pleasance with Anonymous is a Woman Theatre Company. This show put Alice's burgeoning identity as a performance poet to the fore and she also challenged herself to learn a new physical skill - that of Aerial Hoop. "Speaking Out..." has brought Alice into new, exciting territories and transformed her into all manner of strange and wonderful things. Thanks to this work she has become a poet, an aerialist, a manikin in a museum display case and, with the assistance of Sh!t Theatre, a real live Fairy stuck on top of a 12 foot Christmas Tree; a crazy performance endeavour she returns to every Christmas.

In 2018 Alice also began contributing both artefacts and verse to exhibitions at Colchester Museums. Her extravagant "Night Circus Dress" featured in a display case at Hollytrees Museum, (as did she herself briefly), for the "We Are Colchester" exhibition and in 2019 she went on to contribute to "Adorn"; providing a new poem for that exhibition's launch. Alice has also become a troop dancer with Angelica Bangs’ Burlesque Bangs and is a regular Hostess for The Sequin Society and the Queen Street Brewhouse Cabaret.

In 2021 Alice become part of the Mercury Theatre’s Mercury Creatives scheme to develop her business skills. She later began working on developing a new creative talent too; she’s now exploring gender in the world of Opera by challenging herself to take on what still remains her biggest fear - learning to sing! “Trans Lady Sings” has been funded by Arts Council England’s “Developing Your Creative Practice” programme. The project remained in development until “The Trans Lady Sings” finally took to the stage at Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2023. Alice also secured further support from Arts Council England to continue to tour “Speaking Out…” throughout 2022 and into 2023; including the show’s first ever international performance, in Avignon. In 2023 she successfully applied for further ACE funding to take the whole Trans Lady Trilogy on tour in 2024, across the UK and also back to France. With Trans Lady Sings now in the touring repertoire Alice is working on another personal challenge “The Literal Translation.” an English / French bilingual show for 2026 - All she has to do now is actually learn to speak some French…