Suspended Disbelief: 15 Years of Art from Elvis’ Birthday Fight Club

December 12, 2025 - January 17, 2026
In the Creative Alliance Gallery
Opening Reception December 12, 2024, 6 - 8 pm

Suspended Disbelief shares nearly 100 objects from the 15-year history of Elvis' Birthday Fight Club (EBFC). The annual theatrical experience started as a little burlesque show and has since become a DC/Baltimore cultural touchstone with its own punch-drunk logic, physics, and rituals. 

At the opening of each performance, the character of Commodious (Elvis' Toilet) tells the audience, "you may have to suspend your disbelief a little tiny bit." With sleazy humor, a penchant for fart jokes, and cartoon-like violence, EBFC creates a world where someone wearing a trash can and a 5-gallon bucket from Home Depot is undoubtedly Lego Batman. A place where an object made of a hand armature, gaff tape, paint, and string from a discarded dog toy is a dreaded MONKEY PAW.  And where a foam sculpted head attached to a bike helmet with beauty store weave is the prettiest My Little Pony of all time (RIP Sparkleshine, gone but not forgotten). Why? Because the outrageous is more fun than verisimilitude, and the surreal sometimes more honest than the real.

Suspended Disbelief invites you to get up close to costumes and props that were never designed for up-close magic, but here they are...flaws, hot glue, and all; and, arguably still very much magical.