The Maid's Project

The Maid’s Project (working title) is a performative dance research project exploring hybrid identity through the lens of a mixed-race Third Culture Kid (TCK). Raised across Tokyo, London, and Brussels, Eimi Leggett’s relationship to her Japanese heritage is intimate yet contested. Living in Brussels’ international artistic community has inspired her to reclaim this heritage through her creative practice.

The project investigates Japanese maid cafés—spaces of effeminate service designed to comfort lonely men through hyper-personalised care. The maid persona embodies deep contradictions: empowered yet dismissed, desired yet ridiculed. By placing this figure within a queer, international framework, Eimi asks: how can extreme, performative submissiveness exist in queer art? How does a body tied to domestic labor reclaim bodily autonomy and heritage? What would a maid service look like tailored for women in a multiracial city like Brussels?

Through performance, Eimi aims to subvert the maid persona to examine identity, intimacy, and domesticity.

This residency period will be an initial point where it is focused mostly on research and on ground working.