chiqui-love-elsc“Life is a cabaret, old chum…”
Liza Minnelli, 1972

Chiqui Love started her striptease career back in 2002, main reason of course being that she was completely broke and had a thing for being on the stage (and also considering that she is a pretty rubbish waitress)… Since her very early years dancing and theatre have played a great part in her life, perhaps to escape being more “serious” and shy (believe it or not, Chiqui can be shy). The stage is a place where things are more fun and decadent, where music is the protagonist and where you can have full on drag-queen-makeup-and-eyelashes style at midday as a “uniform”.

Her first experiences of the industry were more “shocking” to her and had little or nothing to do with the “glamazons” she had seen in films. It certainly did not look like fun, but more like a place where women were not being treated with much respect by the bar owners, and the girls in return did not make much of an effort. So she decided to take things in her own hands and became as good as possible at entertaining, choosing music that was fun (her first audition was to Ricky Martin’s “Living La Vida Loca” for a very large crowd, who were left trying to figure out what just happened) and from that moment on the costumes became bigger, the music louder, the glitter more intense and the eyelashes more prominent.

Thanks to this approach Chiqui Love has become a popular dancer in the circuit, dancing from the low-end strip pubs all over London to such glamorous events as the Lifeball, Vienna with Agent Provocateur. She is a regular dancer at the world’s leading fetish club Torture Garden, club nights such as Aphrodisiacs and cabaret nights such as Sleaze, one of the very few female performers at the gay scene in Gran Canaria (even in fact giving gay men erections, a proud achievement of hers) and winning Stripper of The Year at the Erotic Awards in 2006. Her personality has been played in a theatre production in Soho about Burlesque performers, “Burlexe” which was based around the time she was campaigning to save Shoreditch strip pubs from the Hackney Nil Policy.

You can find her regularly at the White Horse in Shoreditch, Torture Garden and Belle Epoque, a wonderful circus and burlesque themed party in London. Her happiest place is on the stage when she out into a crowd of smiling people, just having a really good time.