At this point, anyone who has been reading my posts and
pages, ought to have a taste for what I am doing. As I state in my introductory
page, Hey SS, Why are Your Sessions So Naughty?,
I am not a burlesque performer. Will I do it one day? I think it is almost
inevitable. Here is why:
When I began to do my fieldwork about a year and a half ago,
I knew nothing. Not one thing. I had barely talked with five performers beyond dishing
out standard compliments on their acts. I didn’t have much literature under my
belt that directly or indirectly related to the New York burlesque scene. The
first “burlesque show” I went to was an accident; I had no intention of
observing and learning from this community over the long term, nor would I ever
have thought that, just over a year later, I would be applying for and
receiving a grant to share the lessons that burlesque can teach with academics,
burlesque admirers, my mom, and maybe one day many more people. If you can’t
tell, this blog post is about to get into the confessional mode.
I have to admit that I am in love with burlesque.
I love the venues - small and divey where almost anything
goes, or large and “upscale” where there are VIP seats and sold out, minimum-service
tables. I love the theatricality and the costuming; the way burlesque
performers can create and share a fantasy persona. I love the dancing, the
choreography, the slow reveal. I love and appreciate a great host. But more
than anything else, I love the women on the stage.
Watching burlesque and thinking about its history, about how
many performers have and continue to defy and define gender performances, either
explicitly or subtly, consciously or not, I continue to gain new insights and
ideas. I am constantly meeting up with these along the road to a more
comprehensive view of burlesque as I have witnessed it over the months. This
past week I (re)learned a very important, timely lesson. It was one that I had admittedly
swept aside, suspended in my approach to understanding the culture and
community. The lesson was simple: in the verbatim words of my high school U.S.
History teacher, “It’s always about money.” I carried that lesson with me. I
applied it. I used it to understand a
lot of the “whys” that have come up for me. It was often an easy answer to
things that seemed very complex.
What I had failed to do was to apply this lesson to
burlesque. Perhaps I was being romantic. In fact, I know that I was. I
envisioned burlesque as a fairy tale space; a land inside a snow globe, where
everything glitters and looks pretty. I thought, even though it isn’t real, it’s real enough. Certain combinations of glamour and fantasy can take
us there, so that even the audience is partaking in this world. I can think of
no better example of this than the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend, which I was
lucky enough to visit in the summer of 2011. There we were at the New Orleans
Hotel in Las Vegas, stuck in the middle of the desert, a group of devout
journalists, photographers, fans and performers dressed up, dressed down,
dressed in barely anything at all. Even in Vegas a bunch of burlesque
performers get some hard stares: “What are
you, what is this?” I remember a time
when, after Le Scandal, I was sitting
with several performers at a bar when a man approached the table and asked, “Are
you in a play?” Madame Rosebud, Bastard Keith, Trixie Little, the Evil Hate
Monkey, and Minnie Tonka just about shared the same facial expression –
something between pitied amusement and mild annoyance. When the inquirer
eventually walked away, Rosebud gave a little grin, “A burlesque play.” In a way, it’s like an elaborate game of dress-up,
with roles, directions, costumes, and a plot…
As an audience member, anthropology student, enthusiast, fan,
and sometimes friend at a burlesque show, I play a certain role. I am not there
to critique an act and pick a performer apart. I am there to interpret what I
see with minor and sometimes major clarification from what I am told about what
I see. This clarification may come from the performers, from other audience
members, from retrospect, and/or from the directly and indirectly relevant
texts I read. I, too, am playing a role, and it is one that I fully enjoy. I
believe that I was making the mistake of wanting the ideal more than the thing
itself; of romanticizing what I had witnessed. Is burlesque romantic? I think
yes, and it should be. It would not be burlesque if no one had stage names,
elaborate costumes, and choreographed strip-teases; it would be real life.
There would be nothing for me to write about here. I maintain that burlesque is
a space for imaginations and, more importantly, an agreement between
imaginations. A good audience-host-performer relationship is based on the
consensual understanding that what is going on is a show, a spectacle, something worth spending twenty bucks on so that
everyone can enjoy a little escape from boring, and perhaps even walk away with
inspiration.
However, the break from real life is not always clean and
pretty and, to re-take up what I learned in high school, money is important. I don’t
think that anyone gets into burlesque to make it big; though I could be wrong,
and I wouldn’t doubt that the desire for fame and fortune, or at least
appreciation and security, is very real
for many a burlesque performer. On an even more basic level, a girl’s gotta eat.
That isn’t sexy, that’s real life; and though I’ve had more than one performer tell
me that burlesque dancers are chronically broke, the idea of the performers’ daily
grind gets swept under a thick rug. This does not make her financial worries, goals,
or rent any less real.
Even as burlesque can celebrate femininity, sexuality, and
subversion, with performers inviting us into a space where meanings can be
construed, flipped, fit, or recrafted, OR where we can go to simply enjoy the
aesthetic pleasures of the human form, there are everyday factors in the mix.
For a minute, it saddened me to think of the mundane and even bleak aspects of
performers’ lives; but I think that now, when I look back on the past week, I
appreciate burlesque even more. There is no such thing as a true escape from
reality. In one way or another, the everyday must meet with the fantasy. What
it will look like, how it will move, and the effects it will have on those who
are there to witness – that is where the fun comes in.
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