Burlesque: it's just a bunch of women posing on stage, isn't it?

Previously published in  the Skinny

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 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.

I loved burlesque when I first encountered it, over the back of the head of my ex-girlfriend who had banned me from even mentioning it for eighteen months. It was a community – the performers, the promoters, the audience, were the same people. It lacked the legitimacy of Arts Council Funding, it turned up at fetish clubs and every theatre company was trying to quote it for a moment of street credibility. Besides, there was plenty of naked flesh, male and female, and acts like Vendetta Vain’s footbinding routine were firing off in about eight directions at the same time: she just had to walk on stage and assumptions about sexuality and power were hitting the ceiling.

Eventually, I got around to watching an undisputed legend of neo-burlesque, Dita Von Teese. Her recent DVD, Live At the Crazy Horse, was incomprehensible. Apart from exposing her limited range as a dancer – she just floats around and poses – it smacked of bourgeois entertainment that seeks to hide eroticism behind taste. And the Girls of The Crazy Horse came across like some bizarre nude comment on mechanical reproduction – identical, disciplined and wearing their nudity like a suit of armour.

It got worse when I saw Modesty Blaze’s Burlesque Undressed. Apart from featuring a bunch of modern stars of burlesque, who were adrift in some parallel fantasy world of incense and good vibrations, the whole performance came down to the size of Modesty’s budget. It’s what the Japanese call “cosplay”: all costume, no content.

Then we have the theatre critic of the Guardian reviewing the All New Hurly Burly Show. Apart from the dubious attempt to categorise burlesque as striptease – has he been to a stripclub lately? – it fails to notice that these large scale burlesque shows are tamed erotica, a conflation of celebrity worship and glamour excluding burlesque’s satirical spirit. Only whereas the best burlesque has a bite – Cat Aclysmic’s Suffragette throws up questions about feminism’s relationship to striptease, even if it refuses to answer them definitely – this cosplay is posing in flash outfits.

In the film, Modesty says that she is empowered by performing, but not stripping. Fine: but it is where she gains her power that is the problem. Rather than using the medium to make points, or connect to the cabaret tradition that has a strong engagement with ideas of decadence and normative behaviour, she just laps up the audience’s adoration. By doing this, she establishes a dominant ideal of burlesque – it’s cheeky, but harmless. Its heritage is made safe, contained.

I can't forget that the current neo-burlesque revival was inspired by some hardcore riot grrls, and calls up the ghosts of an era of vicious exploitation. It grew from a grassroots movement, made its own space. Modesty and Dita may have been there at the start, but they are diluting the product. Worse than that, by entering the mainstream, they are defining burlesque as something glossy.

Back to the Guardian review:, Michael Billington says “this isn't burlesque”, before delivering a cheap line about the celebration of the female form. I am sure he is trying to be post-modern and hip, but in telling a performer what she is doing, he crosses the line between critic and school teacher. And when he says that “it makes a change from Ibsen”, he is missing the point that both Ibsen and cabaret have the potential to evoke that precious moment of recognition in the audience.