The South African-born performance artist, actor, singer and musical-saw player Le Pustra (b.1977), also known as 'Vaudeville's Darkest Muse', performs internationally in cabaret and burlesque. Known for his white-painted face which he credits as giving him confidence, his character is loosely based on the Commedia dell'arte Pierrot. He is seen here in 2013 at Apartment 58, a London club venue on New Oxford Street.

This is one of a series of offstage photographs documenting the international scene of male performers taken by the Danish photographer Magnus Arrevad (b.1981) who is based in Berlin and London. Shot over a five-year period in cities ranging from New York to London, Copenhagen, Berlin and Paris, they feature the personal transformations of cabaret performers, drag queens, strippers and go-go dancers, capturing them bringing, as Magnus Arrevad has said: 'the dream of oneself into being'. Using a Mamiya 7 camera instead of a digital camera, gave Magnus: 'a sense of occasion to every shot, made each click of the shutter an event.' Many of the resulting photographs, that formed part of the 2015 exhibition and book Boy Story: A Picture Book for Boys,are imbued with the haunting sense of melancholy that the performers experience in the creation and exhibition of their 'other selves'. Arrevad shows how donning the makeup and costume was for the performers part of the process of removing a mask, not putting it on, and has said that working with them changed him from: 'a sheltered Danish photographer into a fully-immersed participant in the world of "Boylesque"'.