Waxie Moon screen grabs from the documentary by Wes Hurley

Glamour, tragedy, gentleness, fierceness, masc, fem, a leather flogger and a magic wand. Waxie Moon has got it all.

Seattle’s favourite “gender-blending queer lady boylesque performance art solo stripping sensation” is a truly phenomenal one-off who can rock a dive bar, classical dance stage or riverbank graveside with the same mix of grace, camp and sucker-punch emotionality.

London audiences have yet to meet Waxie in person but you can see the legend on screen at the Hackney Attic on Sunday March 2 at next month’s edition of BURN, the platform for moving images by cabaret artists that I produce. We’ll be screening several of Waxie’s collaborations with filmmaker Wes Hurley, including the award-winning 2009 documentary feature about Waxie and the premiere of the duo’s freshest collaboration, web series Capitol Hill. Here’s a basic primer on the wonder that is Ms Moon.

Boring old distinctions like male and female, classy and trashy, clothed or nekkid mean nothing – nothing! – to Waxie Moon

From being the only boy in the troupe for The Nutcracker to jacking for the B-52s, Waxie Moon delights in upending expectations around gender, desire, performance and style. It’s all totally fearless, totally gorgeous and totally puts to rest the question of whether a bald head and handlebar moustache can go with glitter and heels. Duh.

Waxie Moon has serious classical dance chops

Waxie – aka Marc Kenison – trained at the prestigious Juilliard conservatory in New York and danced with the acclaimed Jose Limon company, including a gig for the Clintons at the White House. Then he went leftfield and co-founded Seattle’s experimental Washington Ensemble Theatre. Still not freaky enough. Then NYC neo-burlesque legend Dirty Martini persuaded him to take one of her fan-dance classes (“I know you have high heels,” she said) and he never looked back. “Taking my clothes off in front of people is fun!”

Waxie’s name is a reclaimed insult with a special whiff

A reviewer once called Kenison’s performance in a dance show “waxy”. “I was like, ‘What does that mean? Is it good? Is it bad?’ It was kind of obnoxious. But I thought, ‘I’m going to take ownership of it’.” And so the seed was sown for what would eventually become Kenison’s glorious alter ego. When the time came, he decided to spell Waxie with an -ie because it “sounded more androgynous… like that one colgne in the 70s, Charlie”. We want a Waxie Moon cologne immediately.

Waxie gives a mean Cassidy from A Chorus Line, and wants to play Ibsen.

The documentary screening on March 2 includes a bunch of performances created especially for the camera in locations ranging from a riverbank to a highway overpass. But one of the most amazing is in a dance studio, where Waxie channels Cassie, the character from A Chorus Line who has to prove her worth after a dip in her fortunes (“I’m a dancer. That’s who I am!”). It’s not just a campy take on the role but a really shrewd character reading. “I’d like to see Waxie plays Nora in A Doll’s House,” Kenison has said, and he could do it, too. To be filed alongside such other gorge trans castings as La JohnJoseph’s Duchess of Malfi, David Hoyle’s Mrs Danvers and Rose Wood’s Elizabeth I.

Waxie is about to be all over the internet

Waxie and Wes’s latest collaboration is a web series called Capitol Hill. It’s still being created but it features Waxie as a country girl making in the big city. It features nuns, cops, leather, lippy, monobrows, TV studios and burlap couture. What could be better? The fact that the European premiere is at BURN!