Club Noir 2010

The oldest and largest burlesque show in the UK
EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 07 DECEMBER 2010


While many other burlesque nights have faded away, Club Noir keeps going strong. A loyal party crowd, its willingness to expand beyond burlesque – recent collaborators include Scottish Opera – and high quality costume have ensured that Noir has held its market position throughout the revival and into the New Burlesque Order.

Club Noir strives to be more than just a series of routines: it regularly features bands (this time it was the Seventeenth Century, a group of young men who take their cues from both folk and the Godspeed You! Black Emperor school of emotive indie dynamics) and fetish inspired acts, linked together by glamorous women and camp men stripping. It is certainly trying to be far more than just burlesque: the atmosphere and the audience are crucial parts of the evening. The presence of Jim Gellaty behind the decks made the club evening even more crucial to the entire evening.

As burlesque emerges from being a revival to being part of the entertainment establishment, the challenge becomes how to keep the style fresh: tonight's entertainment was kicked off with the aforementioned Seventeenth Century, took in a dominatrix making a reindeer's Christmas wish come true, a fire act that moved onto arc-welded sparks showering the performer and a old school burst of elegant dance, Gene Kelly style.

The striptease itself is heavy on the costume and concept, holding true to the contemporary burlesque preoccupation with recreation of vintage glamour and tentative narratives: champagne is poured across semi-naked bodies, a man strips between awkward, ironic balletic leaps. There is a ritualistic edge to burlesque, a familiarity that is perhaps at odds with its erotic potential.

Equally important, however, is the participation of the crowd: dressed up either in fancy dress or fetish club style, they greet the performers warmly and dance into the late hours. It is a reminder that the neo-cabaret revival is as much about community as it is about performers.

Club Noir at Halloween

Sometimes, because it has established itself so completely, I forget about Club Noir. It is the biggest burlesque club in the world, and has notched up a decade of major events in Glasgow. And they collaborated with Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet.

When I interviewed Tina Warren for my survey on Glaswegian performance, she was pretty clear about what makes the event distinctive. 

'Club Noir is a bloody brilliant event that brings the most diverse groups of people together,' she noted. 'It brings the freaks and uniques out of the woodwork. And allows audiences to be creative. We have consistently introduced more people to the highbrow arts, the likes of ballet, opera, classical music than any other organisation I can think of.'

Then I noticed that Empress Stah was on the bill for the Halloween special.

Here's what I said about Stah in The Skinny.

Stah was one of the first artists to make the link between burlesque, Live Art and fetish culture. Star of the Edinburgh Torture Gardens, Stah perverts the coy eroticism of most burlesque towards aggressive and cutting comments on sexuality and gender. Supported on the Saturday show by Maleficent Martini, a former ballet dancer corrupted by hard rock and alternative glamour, and on the Friday by broken glass maestro Missy Macabre, Stah is the leader of a new wave of cabaret that genuinely celebrates technique, alternative sexuality and glamour, retaining a sharp intelligent critique of taste and beauty.

Headliner Empress Stah not only shocks by toasting the audience with her own blood, but reveals superb aerial skills

Kabarett will be living up to its reputation as an alternative to the alternative: fresh from performing at Torture Garden and for Damien Hurst comes Empress Stah. Stah is a trapeze artist, another example of how cabaret is hybridising genres and inventing something new and deliciously wicked. Of course, cabaret revivals are inevitably the consequence of financial austerity, an aesthetic response to the failure of politicians. Yet with such urgent creativity, it will hopefully take more than an economic recovery to stop this ferment.



Saturday 1st November 9 p.m. till 3 a.m.

O2 Academy Glasgow, 121 Eglinton Street, G5 9NT