FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.
Previously published in the skinny, 25 MAY 2010
Yeah, baby, I like it raw. If there’s no blood on the stage by the end of act two, I’ll slit my own wrists and flick the bleeding at you. If it doesn’t have a moment where I’m scared half to death, feel intense personal guilt or expect the dancer to fly off into the orchestra pit and shatter their ankle, I’m disappointed.
Burlesque presents me with a contradiction: even at its roughest and most amateur, it celebrates a degree of artifice, of pretence and control that denies my need for authentic emotional connection and challenges my feminist worries about the exploitation of the female body. There is always a residual guilt when I watch burlesque that it romanticises degradation and poeticises a vulgar male gaze. When I watched the recent video of the Crazy Horse Club in Paris, the drilled, emotionless chorines were an object lesson in how dull titillation can be. The choreography pandered to the laziest of assumptions about the value of nudity and the 'artistic' lighting is a fig leaf for a lecherous decadence. By the time Dita Von Teese was paddling around in a champagne glass, my male guilt was hitting the ceiling.
But this wasn’t what I had thought of as burlesque: I’d heard about it from American reviews and performers like Dirty Martini, who snapped together striptease’s ambiguous glamour with a sharp, even political bite. There were the Dragon Ladies, leering from the cover of Headpress magazine. My first Scottish burlesque shows included a stunning transformation from devil to angel from Cat Aclysmic, Vendetta Vain’s tortuous foot-binding routine and a melancholic fan dance by Beatrix Von Bourbon. The audience was predominantly female, supportive and communicative – itself a far cry from the male-dominated spaces of strip-clubs.
Vendetta’s foot-binding piece – one of many wherein she works classic moves with an austere intelligence is a sharp contrast to Kalani Kokonuts’ oriental burlesque. One of the stars of Immodesty Blaze’s rather self-important Burlesque Undressed, Kalani talks new age psycho-babble before incorporating old fashioned stereotypes into a routine. Kalani seems to revere the classic burlesque to such an extent that she has forgotten to ask questions about the stereotyping of nationalities. Vendetta, on the other hand, retains the glamour while unearthing a bitter truth about the beauty myths behind it.
The trite defense that burlesque is feminist because there happens to be some male strippers these days doesn’t bear close examination: it is in the rough play of the edgier acts that the debate heats up. The association of burlesque with striptease is an accident of history. Throughout its history, it has been about parody and the erotic content is one aspect of its aesthetic arsenal. As Live Artists like Annie Sprinkle can testify, it’s a powerful weapon. Like loud music, sexuality cuts across polite responses, polarizing opinion and offering an immediate, visceral thrill.
Immodesty Blaze points out that she is not empowering merely by stripping: performers less obsessed with the expense of their head-dresses use striptease to gather attention, before delivering a sharp point. Cat Aclysmic suggest a third way between uptight conservatism and literal bar-burning – her Suffragette routine incorporates her considerable fire-handling skills to present a wry message.
It is inevitable that any collision with the mainstream will privilege the simplest aspects of burlesque. The mainstream is, after all, obsessed with celebrity. Fortunately, burlesque has had long enough to create its own communities, which are generous and inclusive enough to exist outside of commercial strictures, at least to some extent. Their strong connection to events like Torture Garden gives it a dangerous, visceral edge and allows space for talent to evolve and make good on the promises of empowerment.
At the same time, the growth of burlesque writing gives the community the power to define itself, to deconstruct notions of taste, ideology and genre. Artists like Marisa Carinsky have the intellectual fire-power to draw on academic theory and settle burlesque’s status as a serious performance art, one that can achieve those same moments of emotional recognition as the best of Ibsen.
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