Burlesque is Back: But with a Vengeance?

We live a very coveted existence, spending our lives prancing about in frilly polka dot knickers, amongst phenomenal, intelligent and inspiring women, and spreading love around the world from upside down!

It is such a pleasure and a privilege to be part of these unexpected, peripheral and eclectic spaces on the margins of the mainstream, where we learn about ourselves, our bodies and our desires.

In what other spaces are we able to pour icing and candy over our bodies, paint each other in glow plaint, play with fire, fly with wings, untie ourselves from fetish ropes, dance with dry ice, have baths in giant champagne glasses or take our clothes off to Beethoven? For me, the most thrilling element of burlesque is its anti-establishment disdain for social rules and cultural convention, and its plight to transgress patriarchal, social and governmental regulation of female sexuality.

From its historical flourish during the Long Depression of the 1870-90s and Great Depression of the 1920s- 30s, burlesque emerged as a mode of erotic performance that was profoundly political. The lavish decadence and extravagance of burlesque in a time of extreme poverty and disillusion acted to mimic, mock, ridicule and show up bourgeois decadence and the ‘hedonism of the boom’.  In the prohibitionist era of the 1920s with its restrictive social mores about nudity and ‘vice’, the act of taking one’s clothes off in public was highly political. Co-founder of the Burlesque Hour Moira Finucane notes that the word burlesque meant ‘a mockery, a grotesquery, an exaggeration.’ In many ways, as Rachel Shteir notes, ‘the undressing act arose as a protofeminist response to restrictive Belle Époque undergarments, particularly the corset’, and burlesque performances were often executed with bawdy humour, sexual innuendo and sharp edged wit to challenge conventions about decency, equality, and regulation.

The revival and resurgence of burlesque in its contemporary form has exploded onto the Sydney performance scene over the last decade. Both classical and neo burlesque including circus and side show variety acts can be seen at venues from Gurlesque, Hellfire, 34B, the Oxford Art Factory, Slide Cabaret Bar, Ruby Rabbit and the Arthouse Hotel, while international burlesque festivals have emerged in London, Amsterdam, New York, Montreal and Paris. Classic burlesque pays homage to iconic female figures and showcases elaborate costuming, crafted narratives, magic shows, tassel-twirling, fan dancing and other visual spectacles celebrating movement, colour, fabric and form. Meanwhile, neo burlesque stars often use forms of strip, nudity and drag to play with ideas about the body, gender, the grotesque and the bizarre to voice new aesthetics, engage and question audiences, and underscore larger social injustices.

Despite its historically irreverent charm, not all burlesque today is necessarily subversive in its intention or effect. The political or radical significance burlesque once held in the mainstream western mediascape with the controversial, sharp-edged, savvy performances of the depression eras has in some ways dissipated to a highly commercialised, particularly modest, appropriate, accepted and conservative form of performing femininity.  In many burlesque events, the focus on classy, tasteful sophistication has in some instances supplanted and obscured the historically provocative, disruptive bawdy humour and political satire at the origins of burlesque. The annual Burlesque Ball capitalises from the banner of burlesque yet exists in direct contrast to its heretical namesake, claiming, ‘This event oozes class and sophistication and all acts are especially produced to always dazzle but never ever offend.’Although burlesque traditionally embodied the ‘low’ invading the ‘high’, mainstream burlesque is often riddled with rhetoric heralding it as a ‘classier’ version of striptease and operating as a kind of ‘the pornography of the elite’. If the essence of burlesque was its chaotic, threatening, anarchic potential, Jacki Wilson asks, ‘[h]as the bite therefore been taken out of burlesque?’

While burlesque is famed for its parodies, Judith Butler writes,

"Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instrument of cultural hegemony."

Where ‘classy’ burlesque is validated over ‘smutty’ striptease, where the desire for diamantes or rhinestones supplants the troubling message behind performance, and where the fashion of burlesque begins to define itself by class and economic privilege, burlesque can become a particularly conservative act whereby gender is articulated, produced, dictated and policed on stage. As Ariel Levy says of striptease and nudity, ‘An interest in these things used to seem like a way of resisting the status quo. Now it feels like a way of conforming.’  Where the term burlesque begins to equate only with algebraic equations for what constitutes ‘erotic’- feather fans, diamantes, stockings and corsets- burlesque can become a formulaic production of clichéd recipes, uniforms or prescriptions for women to understand and express their bodies and desires. Burlesque then is no longer accessible to the masses as a form of social commentary, but instead requires ostrich feather plume fans, heart shaped tassels and stockings. Sociologist Beverly Skeggs notes that many ‘enhancement’ techniques in addition to props, custom-made costumes and professional photo shoots necessitate forms of class privilege, needing certain economic and financial capital to access them. Where burlesque acts to code certain experiences as highly erotic, and in turn produce others as banal, bizarre, grotesque, ugly or deviant, it can operate to place extraordinarily narrow perimeters on female expression and operate to exclude, prevent, and prohibit certain bodies, genders, ages, abilities, orientations, attitudes, sexualities, classes, ethnicities and fetishes from being represented.

Yet the burlesque stage provides ample ambit not only to mirror but to overthrow, undermine, resist and contest the representation of female sexuality and her body in society.  The metaphoric narratives of burlesque can critique the way in which we are instructed to perform or our gender on the larger cultural stage, and reveal the generated, produced, politicised and phantasmic natures of gender itself. The staging of female gender in burlesque illuminates the ways in which, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, ‘one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’. With its long fake eyelashes, giant stiletto heels and drag like qualities, burlesque, rather than reflecting any universal female experience, instead presents ‘womanliness as a masquerade’, highlighting the plethora of different cultural symbols used as markers for female intelligibility. Bawdy burlesque, where it moves beyond mere mimesis and instead towards disruption and disturbance, can ‘reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalised categories of identity and desire.’

Perhaps one of the finest examples of burlesque in all its iconoclastic charm is on the queer scene in Sydney. Queer burlesque performance is often as much defined by its gender play as it is by carnivalesque traits of irreverence and inversion. Immersed at the centre of the notorious Carnival is the gleeful inversion of social hierarchies (male and female), the mocking of authority (church and state) and the meshing of larger ideas of interconnectedness, life cycles, ritual, human and animal; ‘kings become servants, officers serve the ranks, boys become bishops, men dress as women’. Epitomised by the Mardis Gras and elements of laughter, mockery, the absurd, artifice, the obscene and the grotesque, much queer performance operates within a space in which normal rules, binaries and regulations don’t apply. In these ‘ritual inversions’ and ‘world upside down’, queer burlesque performance - instead of repeating notions of female as nice, clean and pretty- often emphasises the politics of pleasure, indulgence and celebration.

Radical in both its liberalism and rarity, unique spaces like female and trans only Gurlesque features both amateur and professional burlesque performers whose acts are significantly, unscreened and uncensored. The combination of outlandish displays of wild exhibitionism and female audiences enjoying sexual gratification, entertainment or enjoyment through performance in a room without men or a male gaze significantly disrupts heteropatriarchal ideas about the sources of women’s pleasure and fulfilment. Moreover, performers use their narratives onstage to open up spaces to discuss the intersection of sex, gender, race, class and other social inequalities, to use Monica Rector’s words, as ‘a phenomenon of communication’. Gurlesque shows often use comedy to highlight continuing fears about women’s sexuality, nudity, and sexual explicitness, the way we still experience state, social or class attacks on the ‘grotesque’ body, and expectations for women to be modest, tame, monogamous, nice, and slim.

Convenors Sex Intents and Glitta Supernova have encouraged all women & trannies to get up on the stage & express themselves, to confront fears & insecurities of what is deemed in the world of erotic art as being socially sexable, to challenge taboos , both sexual & social, & those to do with the physical body, to explode myths about body structures, & what a patriarchal society dictates is sexy or attractive.

Burlesque performers thus have the unique capacity to challenge, disrupt and question audiences about popular concepts of beauty, bodies, body fluids, aesthetics and acceptability. What Makes Men Blush use ‘burlesque as a vehicle to subvert and pervert the perverted’ and deal with themes of war, hyper-masculinity, violence, revolution and injustice as well as ‘pretty sparkly things’. Imogen Kelly, who describes herself as ‘more cult than mainstream’, ‘fabulously non-conformist’, and ‘a burlesque saboteur - playfully disemboweling female archetypes’ has a ‘particular penchant for deconstructing burlesque.’ Similarly, the Burlesque Hour, the project of Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, embodies the cutting edge, absurd, grotesque and bizarre to comment on contemporary social issues in a mix of circus, cabaret and vaudevillian humour. Their 2004 show was described by Finucane and Smith as a 'revolution in a chocolate box’.

Although the term burlesque is often interpreted in popular culture as synonymous with anything from red corsets to the Pussycat Dolls, burlesque performance in fact has long been a catalyst for social revolution and critique. Instead of echoing and reproducing dominant and hegemonic understandings of gender and class, burlesque aimed to dissolve and problematize those paradigms. While even relatively tame burlesque can constitute a celebration of female sexual deviance, a challenge to hetero-patriarchal restraints upon how women should behave, and a reclamation of women’s right to be sexually assertive and confident, the satirical and activist essence that defined burlesque in the depression eras appears largely absent from the recent wave of mainstream burlesque that identifies itself through class, sophistication and fashion.

For me, burlesque is about spreading love around the world from upside down, and creating a new iconography through which to express and celebrate our perversities, idiosyncrasies, hopes and desires. Burlesque should not be a singular, repetitive formula but instead, as Carol Martin writes, a tactile, textual site for women’s counter culture, and a means to intervene in dominant, patriarchal or heteronormative codes to ‘configure desire differently’. That way the enormous but underutilised transformative potential of burlesque can be translated and fostered as a catalyst or facilitator for larger social change. Long live the quirky, bizarre, bent and confronting burlesque that makes audiences gasp, stare and squirm in their seats!