Bushwick Burlesque: Beach or Bust - Past and Presence on Coney Island.
Tags: Body-positivity,
burlesque community, booty bounce, subversion
The
room is painted with the kinds of colors that are reminiscent of a bad horror
story set at a circus. The staff is friendly and witty and small, with a young
dark-haired girl between the diner-style counter and the coolers full of beer.
As patrons stroll in gradually, the tables fill up with people who are waiting
for the show to begin. It is 8 pm. I am sipping on the world’s best Folger’s coffee,
so I am told. 8:30 rolls around and I look curiously at the admission stamp on
my hand: A hot dog with a mermaid tail in a bow tie, eating a hot dog. Yes, this
is Coney Island, and I wouldn’t ask for anything different. The show is about
to begin.
“Ladies
and Gentlemen, please proceed to the back for Bushwick Burlesque: Beach or Bust!” One by one people quickly file into the back auditorium, where a
medium-sized stage is lit up in red and blue. Over the course of this show, the
crowd will grow to about 30, with a surprising array of demographics
represented: black, white, Latin, men and women, young and old, all have come
out to see the raunchy, artful spectacle which burlesque veteran Darlinda Just
Darlinda co-produces with boyfriend Scary Ben and Heather Loop. The venue,
located on Surf Ave. of the historically carnivalesque Coney Island, combined
with the experience and audacity of tonight’s performers, promises a show that
will speak to burlesque’s roots in the exotic, the side-show-y, the risqué. Booties
will bounce. Genitals will show. Cheeks will flush. Check your Sunday School
lessons at the door; they are no match for Heather Loop’s ass tassels.
Scary Ben rolls out the show with a strip from his street clothes and a reverse
strip into his hosting gear, giving us a hearty glance of his jockstrap
before transforming into a comically stern-faced, 1940s/hipster fusion host. He
introduces the first performer, Fancy Feast, who enters the stage wearing full
college-graduation attire. The red glitter-encrusted seams and fishnets peeking
out from underneath her cape immediately suggest the parodic elements of her
act; and sure enough, Fancy Feast strips down out of cape, hat, and red corset to
reveal the wrinkled diploma hiding in her bosom, which she proceeds to tear
into pieces. Heather Loop gives us a double dose of scrumptious acts – first was
her purple bike act, in which she literally rides the thing every which way before
finally figuring out that she needs to strip out of her tight purple dress and
corset in order to ride the thing properly; but not before she sits on the front tire of and peddles on the
bike upside down. “Does anyone think they could do that?” asks Scary Ben
afterwards. Nope. Probably wouldn’t know how to wedge myself off the tire.
The
whole act – from her interest in riding the bike, to her struggle to ride it
efficiently while still maintaining the garments of a “proper lady”, to her
eventual disposal of her clothes in order to get on and ride the bike – were oddly
in sync with a segment of Pin-up Grrrls I
had just read on my way to Coney Island. Maria Elena Buszek relates the ways in
which bicycles were a means of literal and figurative mobility for women during
first-wave feminism in the late 19th century: “Bicycling… was a
loaded activity clearly associated with feminism at the turn of the century: from
the unfussy dress that the sport required… to the sexual connotations of the
machine itself, young women riders were seen as advertising their
progressivism"(page 103) Shedding the restrictive dress, corset, and garters which were
once staples of feminine attire, Heather Loop finds that she is free from the
bonds of ideals of the “true” or “proper” woman.
Her
second act- oh, man, her second act. Heather Loop comes out in Daisy Dukes-type
garb, complete with a plaid button up top, exposed mid-section, and ultra-short
jean shorts. I don’t know about you, but I had to take a deep breath when I
realized that shorts cut so that your ass-crease shows were an actual thing,
and not just a “mistake” that girl made when she bought a size down. They’ve
even got a name- Cheeky Shorts. Cheeky Shorts! Okay, fine, a little crease peek
never got anyone killed – maybe. But I appreciated Heather’s hyper-exaggerated
version of the Cheeky Short. They were so short they seemed parodic. The most
impressive part was that the more booty bouncing she accomplished, the more the
shorts began to resemble Brazilian-cut underwear more than anything else. How’s
that for a version of the Cheeky Short? Did I mention she was also wearing ass
tassels? For those of you are burly-q
newbies, ass tassels are a version of nipple pasties which are placed on the
butt cheeks and have fringy tassels that swirl around, and around, and around. And
up and down. And whichever way Heather Loop’s booty bouncing takes us.
Darlinda
and Scary Ben are lovers. Burlesque lovers. Burlesque lovers are of a different
breed. And since this is their show – well, you better expect something as
off-color as the color combinations here. After Ben relays his feelings of
sadness, loneliness, and horniness during the many times when Darlinda has been
out and about doing cool burlesque things all over the planet, the two reenact their
passionate reuniting. The several-minute long skit is meant to be hilarious,
but I think that a lot of people laughed out of comic relief, if they laughed
at all. I personally got a kick out of Darlinda’s rainbow g-string which matched
Scary Ben’s rainbow jockstrap . But as all good things must come to an end, these
accouterments also had to go. Thus we have a totally nude couple on the stage.
I think only the older couple next to me left – I was too busy laughing to pay
much attention.
Darlinda
Just Darlinda stuns the crowd with the first of two brilliant acts: her lotion
ritual. She comes out in a baby girl pink towel, her face poised with the kind
of virginal innocence we know from Sandy of Grease
– before her much more exciting turn into America’s baddest high school chick. Darlinda
removes the pink towels, first from her head to let down a shock of wavy red
hair, then from her body to reveal the kind of curves which sculptors,
painters, and figure drawers have long
attempted to describe. The easy strip down to nothing shows us more than just a
stunning figure – Darlinda radiates the kind of confidence and body-positivity which
turns so many women onto burlesque.
Her
second act presents us with a more provocative, political message. A
blonde-wigged Darlinda enters the stage, dresses in a sparkling red dress and a
huge, over-enthusiastic smile, holding an American flag in each hand. She
throws off the blonde wig to let down her wild red locks, loses the flags, and
appears a freer, less patriotic, sexier woman. But the transformation comes to
a halt as she strips down and pulls out a piece of paper that was tucked
between her legs. She pulls it out slowly, expression slowly erupting into
horror as she unravels the paper to reveal: the Republican elephant. The meaning of this act is made more explicit later on; as Scary Ben told me, "It is about expelling the painful and sickening propaganda of patriotism and politics from the body. She is commenting on the Republican party's current war on women and controversy about vaginal reproduction." At the end of the act, Darlinda tears the paper to shreds.
When
asking new performers what got them into burlesque, the number one reason is to
increase confidence and body-positive sentiments. This is a way for women of
every shape, size, and shade to regain a hold over her body image, which we
know extends deep into the human psyche. A healthy body image creates positive
sentiments towards oneself and towards others; rejecting the tyranny of a narrowly
defined range of beauty allows women to define an image of beauty that works for them. They can then project this
image into the world by the way they dress and comport themselves. Burlesque
dancers do this every time they step on the stage. Best of all, each of these
images is a welcome part of the community; indeed, the “identity” of the NYC community
itself, if there ever could be a such a clean way to describe it, would be a
group of men and women who welcome the exploration and manifestation of various
sexualities.
Fem
Appeal does an act in which she pays tribute to Pam Grier's Foxy Brown and Coffy. Fem fills the role of a strong, literally kick-ass woman from the blaxploitation era.
I had seen her perform some time ago doing her act “Spooky,” in which she juxtaposes
a silky white dress with her face painted to look like she’s going to eat
yours. (Not that that happens in real life… Well, her act was before the
incident, anyway.) I truly enjoy almost anything that happens on the stage, but
I have to say that I really appreciate it when burlesque gets subversive, edgy,
challenging, relevant. Along with variety, these are the links between
burlesque of today with burlesque that date back to Lydia Thompson and the
British Blondes.*
The
array of performers here tonight is evidence of the fact that burlesque –
especially New York City burlesque, with its Do-It-Yourself feel – is an all-bodies
space, with types ranging from androgynous to curvy. Miss Fem Appeal, with her
androgynous looks and comical inversion of gender roles, performs in tandem
with Diety Delgado, whose make-up and costuming render her almost extraterrestrial,
beyond gender. Both of these performers work along the similar thread of
challenging the audience with unfamiliar performances of femininity and
masculinity. Deity’s white-painted face appears stoic as she pulls on a cigarette;
her robotic movements hardly rustle her paper dress. Comparing this to the
super-dynamo quality of Heather Loop’s booty-bouncing, or to Darlinda Just
Darlinda’s symbolic triumph over the Republicans' War Against Women, and
we see how the tradition of variety endures on the burlesque stage, both in the
types of bodies and the tone of acts on the stage.
In
addition, all of the acts were, at least one point, downright hilarious. There
are so many ways that burlesque performers make us laugh. Whether people in the
audience realized it or not, often what they were laughing were the everyday elements
of femininity which the dancers have appropriated for use in their acts: a woman
wearing make-up that does not match the rest of her skin (Deity Delgado), a girl
wearing shorts so short that almost her entire butt shows, ass tassels and all
(Heather Loop), a woman who sheds her
Miss American appeal (literally and figuratively letting her hair down) only to find that an outside entity (the Republican party) is attempting to regulate and legislate her body and what she does with it. When the performers are on the stage, these motifs are rendered comical and entertaining. This does not mean that they are not real, not serious, or not painful.
I was really excited to meet up with Darlinda, Scary Ben, and Fem Appeal
after the show. More to come on that soon! Darlinda Just Darlinda, Scary Ben, and Heather Loop put on
Bushwick Burlesque every other Tuesday at The Morgan. I look forward to seeing
and learning from these veteran performers in the future. I’m especially
excited to meet with Fem Appeal before her Monday show at Bar A. Come back for
more show-write ups, which I’ll be cranking out like baby mice from the nest
under my fridge (I swear the exterminator actually wants these things to breed).
I know what I’ll be dreaming of tonight:
Heather Loop’s booty bounce. You’d have to see it to understand. Happy Summer
Solstice!
* For more on this segment of burlesque history, Robert
Allen’s Horrible Prettiness is a very worthwhile read.
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