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Going from trained lawyer to drag queen is an unusual career trajectory, but the British-born Nigerian-raised baritone and cabaret performer known as Le Gateau Chocolat is used to defying convention.
Born George Ikediashi to a deeply religious African family in East London, he was bullied at school when they returned to Lagos to live and knew that as a young queer boy he had to find a way to survive.
“From very early on, I knew my sexuality didn’t really have a place in Nigeria or in my culture,” he says.
Le Gateau Chocolat became a master of disguise as a survival mechanism. Credit: Edwina Pickles
To fit in, he became a master of disguise, which was fine until he returned to boarding school in Britain and was again bullied as he grew to become a “six-foot-tall black man – six-and-a-half foot in heels”.
“I just prayed very hard that I would get a good singing voice, so I could stand on stage in front of a microphone and use it,” he said.
Anyone who’s ever heard his voice would agree those prayers were answered.
He studied opera singing after law, swapped his real name for his stage name, a pun on the musical term, legato (free flowing), and chocolat to honour his skin colour, and became the court jester rather than a court’s counsel.
An outsize figure in towering heels, flamboyant outfits and wigs, Le Gateau Chocolat has toured the world since 2008, singing everything from Wagner to Whitney on the alternative cabaret circuit.
He has commanded stages from East Sussex’s Glyndebourne, the opera lover’s mecca, and London’s Royal Opera House to the Adelaide Fringe and Sydney Opera House.
On Saturday, he dons sequins and satin to take centre stage at the City Recital Hall in Cocteau’s Circle, a collaboration with Brisbane-based contemporary circus company Circa and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
The show, which will close the orchestra’s 50th anniversary national concert season, recreates Le Boeuf sur le Toit, (the ox on the roof) the legendary Paris cabaret bar of the 1920s frequented by Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
“Cocteau, who’s at the centre of this piece, had a father who was a lawyer,” says the performer. “But he practised law, I don’t believe his father practised drag. And I have a law degree but unlike his father have never practised law. We can perhaps be grateful for both those things.”
Le Gateau Chocolat, who considers himself a rule-breaker much like the ACO in classical music, says he likes to turn drag on its head.
“I’m not a female impersonator, I have a beard. I consider myself a clown, whose job it is to make people laugh and open their hearts to someone who looks like me – black, fat and queer,” he says. “Drag is about the make-up of the person behind the make-up. The goal – like all art – is to discomfort the comfortable and comfort the discomforted.”
Cocteau’s Circle tours nationally from November 8-22.
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