Subverse Aphrodesia

in zealous pursuit of emerging aesthetic
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The history of striptease teaches nothing if not that there is always something more to be revealed."
- Jessica Glasscock, Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight.
 
You Gotta Have a Gimmick
 
My personal entrance into the NeoVaudeville was through the sequined and feathered window of New Burlesque. A BUST Magazine enthusiast since 2001, I followed the rise of the New Burlesque in its pages and convinced my best friend (it wasn't hard) to accompany me to the 2004 New York Burlesque Festival in Manhattan. Presented by Thirsty Girl & Pontani Productions, this second annual event was staged at Club Avalon -- what used to be The Limelight when I was in college.
 
 
Burlesque: from the Italian burla meaning farce or joke
 

In her essay New Burlesque or The Veil of Pretence at the end of Katharina Bosse’s book of portraits New Burlesque (2003), Cecile Camart writes:

"This burlesque activism takes on the forms of a desired, constructed and accepted rerouting of – or reaction against – socially predetermined conventions and imageries, and finally a de-framing that nonetheless takes place in the context of a mise en scene and a  questioning of the representation of oneself.”

 

Performers of the New Burlesque generally create a stage persona or avatar with playful, retro names like (as depicted in Bosse’s book):

Kitten DeVille

Dirty Martini

Minnie Maracas

Vivenne Va-Voom

Candy Whiplash

Scarlette Fever

Ming Dynatease

Trixie Tanqueray

Hangman Lola

Babette LaFave

 

 

My own alias cum nickname, KittyBelle Burbank, was developed in this spirit as the title of a fictional memoir/one-woman show I imagined writing about a bored housewife who discovers her self and liberation in the magical world of the New Burlesque. A sort of Desperately Seeking Susan for 21st century audiences in which I could explore my own fantasies. I got sidetracked from the project but ended up using the name to delinate my personal work and artistic exploration from the professional writing I did at my day job (before journalism was stripped of its ivory tower conceit.)

 

 

 

This CBS This Morning story from 2008 on the Burlesque revival is put together well.

 

 

 

“You see a lot of burlesque-themed nightclubs opening, where there are girls dancing with boas, then the curtains close and that’s it. Burlesque was about striptease, and especially in America, a lot of the mainstream burlesque acts are taking all of the important elements about the history of burlesque out. “I’ve made it my personal mission to stay true to what burlesque was in the ’30s and ’40s and keep striptease in. Maybe that makes me a little bit dangerous for an American audience but it’s more important to me that I stay true to the big stars of burlesque, like Gypsy Rose Lee, Lily St. Cyr, and Sally Rand, the women who took their clothes off in front of an audience.”

 

- Dita Von Teese to Rachel Kramer Bussel in

"American Striptease" for The Daily Beast

 

 

 “If you go to a burlesque show , you don’t have to be a Harvard graduate to figure out what the performer is going to do, but if they can kind of shock you along that journey… You know what’s going to happen at the end – it’s how you get there."

- Angie Pontani

“The Reigning Queen of Burlesque”

(from a NYBF promo video)