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LONDON BURLESQUE

A FAMILY ALBUM ANGUS STEWART

Circa Press 50 Great Portland Street London W1W 7ND www.circa.press

ISBN 978-1-911422-37-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed and bound in China

Design: Jean-Michel Dentand

Pre-press: Dexter Premedia

INTRODUCTION 5

BELLE DE BEAUVOIR 19 LADY MAY 49 REIx 83 LADY CHEEK 99 LYNN RUTH MILLER 139 Appendix 144

BELLE DE BEAUVOIR

Striptease Artiste, Producer

How did I get into burlesque? Well, I was going through a very tough time. I was an out of work actress, and I saw a casting for burlesque performers, and it was paid, and I thought, ‘I can do that’. So, I applied and got the job then realised I knew nothing about burlesque, so I did a ton of research, joined The Cheek of It! School of Burlesque and Cabaret to do a course, and then just fell completely in love with it. And it took over my life. I love the old Hollywood icons, and all the glamour, and burlesque is all about that.

Doing burlesque totally changed my life. That sounds kind of fake, but it did. I felt empowered. Now I get to direct, to create costumes, I get to create everything about it, and people book me because they like what I’ve created. Taking off my clothes is just a part of it. It’s an important part, obviously, because it’s my choice and I enjoy doing it. I feel as if I’m reclaiming something. It’s funny, I’m wearing silk, I’m wearing rhinestones, I’m wearing the most expensive fabrics I can afford, but what the audience is really interested in is the wrist, or ankle that I’m about to reveal. That’s so much fun.

There’s an exhibitionist aspect to it, but I think there’s also a political dimension. It’s not just that I want you to see me naked, it’s more, ‘You Will See Me Naked Because My Body is Important’. Plus, you didn’t get to choose what I do with it. I think it’s more about the politics than just ‘look at my butt’. I’m not just exhibiting my body. What I’m exhibiting is the fact that I have ownership over my body and that I choose to do this, and this is what I enjoy. And yes, it’s on my terms. I reveal when I want to reveal, I wear whatever costume I like, and if I don’t want to take off my bra, I won’t. So, it’s more about ownership than nudity.

I am sure there is a perception about burlesque, and who does it, but it’s not just girls getting their kit off, and I do make it political. For me, it’s about starting the conversation. It’s about destroying the narrative that

anybody who takes off their clothes is a mess. I’m doing this because I want to talk about body image. I’m doing this because I want you to think about body image, I want you to think about consent, and I want you to consider your actions; and you should be thinking more about how you view consent and how you are viewing my body than me taking off my clothes. I didn’t imagine myself going in a political direction at first. I thought I would be more old school, because I love all the glamour, all the sparkles. But then I realised I can do both, I can do political acts, I can also do stuff that’s just pretty. And I think that’s political, in the sense that everything’s political – celebration is a form of resistance.

When I joined the burlesque course, I asked myself why. In the beginning, I didn’t want to take off my clothes. I was hopeless in the studio because I wasn’t sure why I was there. And then, over time, I found a family and was able to confront a lot of my own issues, which is how I ended up making my first proper burlesque act, ‘Papillon’. Papillon starts slowly and is quite melancholic. I look up at the audience as if they’re a threat, as if I don’t want to be on that stage. I breathe quite heavily. It’s more acting than dancing at the beginning, it’s saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m here, or what I’m meant to do’, which is exactly how I felt performing burlesque at the time. Then, as the music starts, it becomes more about sensuality, touching my body in a loving way and not being afraid of doing that in front of an audience.

I think sometimes there’s a guilt around loving your body. So, it was hard for me, at first, to embrace my body in front of strangers. I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to, because I wasn’t a size 0 hourglass. But I always feel a sense of calm as soon as the lyrical part starts, as music is something I feel in my body. I perform those first moves with my eyes closed, because they’re just for me. There’s a transition moment, where the corset comes off and everything changes; this piece of clothing that is so restrictive, so bound up theatrically and literally in creating the perfect female form, is removed and my skirt becomes wings. It ends with a final reveal that is about freedom, not sexuality.

The act is about body image, because I figured out who I was through the course; it allowed me to understand my own fear and guilt around the way my body looks. As we went through the process of learning the art of undressing, the art of tease, I became more aware of how insecure I was about my body. I didn’t feel I was enough in any way; not skinny enough, sexy enough, important enough, to take up space on a stage. It took me

a few months to start dancing for myself and to do what I enjoyed, rather than trying to perform in a way that I thought other people would think of as sexy.

Before I created the Papillon act, as part of the course, we had to do a 30-second preview of our routine. I chose Madonna’s Vogue, and it was terrible. My teacher said, ‘This doesn’t feel as if it’s you’. I was devastated, I’d worked so hard, but I’m not a supermodel, so I can’t do Vogue, that’s it. And then I found a song called Body Love, by Mary Lambert, which is about struggling with hating your body, and I knew I wanted to make something about that. So, I developed an act that explored some of my own vulnerabilities. I paired Mary Lambert’s Body Love with a song called Man Is the Baby, by Antony and the Johnsons, which is all about finding freedom through forgiveness. The song literally says, ‘forgive me’, over and over again and that’s what I wanted to say to myself. Somewhere in between these two songs I feel as if I essentially created a love song to my body.

I used to cry every time I performed Papillon; I would come off stage in floods of tears. It was actually quite therapeutic. It’s weird making an act about loving your body when in fact you don’t. I was saying, ‘This is where I want to be and this is where everybody else should be, you should all love your body’, but I hadn’t yet got there myself. Papillon is about a journey from self-hatred to forgiveness, or acceptance, and so the more I perform it the more I feel that I’m accepting myself. Doing that in front of an audience is almost a rite of passage. It’s also improved my selfconfidence because people come up to me afterwards and say that it touched them, or meant something to them, or that they feel like that about their body too. One woman said to me, ‘I wanted to do burlesque, but I thought I couldn’t because I wasn’t pretty enough, and watching your act made me realise that anyone can do burlesque’. I’m not sure if that was a compliment, or not, but it was very sweet.

I still feel insecure, but now I accept the fact that almost everybody has some sort of issue with their body. And I think that’s normal, I’m not burying it or internalising it. I’m very aware of the things I’m going to work on, and what’s achievable. I want to improve my core strength, so I can dance better. I can take classes for that. I can do my splits. I used to want things because the magazines told me I wanted them; they told me I wanted a thigh gap, and I believed them, but I don’t listen to that any more. I try to trust my own instincts.

Gigi Drizz El, getting ready for the show Opposite: Eleanor Muses, practising her moves

LADY MAY Coach, glamazon, performer

I decided for my birthday to gather my girlfriends and go to a burlesque club. I’ve always loved old movies, and glamour and films – the idea of old Hollywood. That’s all it was, there was nothing political behind it, nothing sensational, nothing sexual. I just wanted to enjoy glamour and beauty. So, I went to Proud Cabaret, and I stepped into this dimly lit, beautiful, peaceful kind of environment that felt like a smoky jazz club. I had a booth, and I had my favourite people around me. I was cocooned in this womb of women, looking at beautiful women. And I remember thinking, well this is lovely. I felt great. I got up on the chairs, and I danced. I was wearing what I wanted, I was with my favourite people, and I had none of the emotional baggage of my relationship in the background any more. That was kind of it. I had a fabulous time.

But I was following Proud on Twitter and they wanted people to join their team, to stage manage. I thought, that’s cool. It didn’t cross my mind that I would ever want to get up on stage. In my brain I’m still this size whatever, huge female that no one wants to look at. I saw beautiful, slim women with perky boobs pouring champagne over their glittered bodies and getting adulation and it never occurred to me that it was something I could do. I didn’t equate how I looked with how they looked, and I didn’t think I had the confidence or the skill. But backstage, yeah, I could do backstage. I was working in fashion at the time, travelling around the world to amazing places. It was creative, but it wasn’t fulfilling. I wanted to do something a little bit naughty, because I hadn’t done anything just for me for a long time.

So, there I was, back at Proud, hanging out in the green room, which smelt of chip fat, and only had one mirror for 17 people. I wasn’t a great stage manager. I didn’t fit the costumes, I had zero experience, I made mistakes, and yet every one of those amazing women welcomed me in. They were goddesses personified, absolute beauties of humankind, at the

top of their game, and they took me into their fold. When I walked them to the stage, I felt like a glamorous bouncer watching from the sidelines. I remember pulling the curtains back and looking out at the audience, and seeing tables and tables of women, cheering and whistling, and having ridiculous hen dos, and work dos, wearing top hats and other crazy stuff. They were just having the most amazing time.

Seeing the high percentage of women in the audience every night, I realised that the women appreciated each other. Of course, some might be looking at the performers, thinking they’re hot, they’re sexy, they’re this or that. But mostly they recognised the guts it takes to get up and do what they do. It’s phenomenal.

If you come to burlesque via a school, you’re cocooned for twelve weeks, you have training, you have a lovely dance studio where you develop an act with the support of your teacher, and you build relationships. That goddess-like energy you see on stage comes from the sisterhood of school, but I don’t think that sisterhood is necessarily different when you get a group of women bonding over what they’re watching, what they’re enjoying, and how it might make them feel about themselves. The cocoon is different, but the sisterhood is still there.

Adult life can be scary, and I meet a lot of people who have suffered trauma in some way. Sometimes we just want to escape, and burlesque is a wonderful playground for adults. It gives you a licence to assume a character, to explore your sexuality. Playing is important – it’s something that, as we grow up, we tend to forget. Equally, if burlesque is just a playground, and you don’t develop as an individual, then you are just taking your clothes off. For me, burlesque is a process you go through. It’s a way of developing and growing, which I think most people don’t realise.

There will always be people who at a particular moment in their lives need a licence to play. They need that opportunity to escape from their box, to absorb themselves in something creative and see that process through. For most of them, just knowing that they can do that, gives them the confidence to go out and tackle other challenges in their lives. A few will want to stay in that playground though, because personal development can be incredibly addictive.

I didn’t enjoy my first experience on stage. What I needed was the confidence to get back out there on my own because, once I did, I had roses thrown my way, and I had friends whooping and hollering, and I realised that there were a thousand things burning in my brain that

I wanted to put out in the world, and that took me forward. It’s been phenomenal. And now I want to create this, and that, I want to have this new costume on, and to work on that new detail. That creative momentum has carried me forward in my personal life. It’s allowed me to grow and change, to be bolder and braver, and to accept that failure is part of the learning process. So maybe someone just wants one spin on the roundabout, and that’s great, but I plan to keep my carousel going.

I think the joy of creating a character is that it’s a licence to do whatever you like. It’s a licence to go shopping, if you want to be superficial about it, an opportunity to buy new shoes and say, ‘It’s not for me, it’s for her’. It’s a licence to be naughty, or funny if you want. But I remind my students at the end of the course that the licence got them on stage, encouraged them to get out there, and that they can say to their families, ‘You’re not watching me, you’re watching a character’.

I also teach my students to tassel twirl. Honestly, for me, it’s the most lightweight but the most pivotal moment in the course, when you look around the room and see all these women giving their all, twirling away. They go in different directions, they go up and down, there’s every possible skin colour and size of breast, or flat chest, or tassels, that you can imagine, and everyone’s hang-ups are forgotten. It’s a beautiful moment of giggling and love. It’s glorious.

I encourage them to carry that moment with them by keeping their tassels on as they head off to the Tube. Only they know that they’ve got a naughty little thing going on under their shirt or their gym hoodie, a little bit of sparkle. I think once you’ve done that, once you’ve appreciated that you can have this moment of pure ‘what the fuck-ery’ and not give a hoot about the boundaries of the situation, you can begin to carry that into your real life.

When you’re new to burlesque, the challenge of the final reveal is the scary bit you’re building up to. Only once you’ve done it will you understand that it was the most exhilarating and freeing experience. What I consistently find is that students who’ve just performed for the first time don’t want to put their clothes back on when they come off stage. They want to run and hug their families, with glitter all over their chest. They want to retain that moment of magic and self-confidence and pride.

Women are told all the time that they should be more modest, that they shouldn’t shout about what they’re good at. So, it’s wonderful to give someone the opportunity to say, ‘Fuck, yeah, look at me, I did well’,

LADY CHEEK Founder of The Cheek of It! Teacher, Coach

After university, a friend and I set up a theatre company creating work about women, exploring the idea of femininity. I’d just finished a performance and visual arts degree at Brighton, and what we were doing was an extension of that. It was quite tongue in cheek. We had fun exploring stereotypes of women’s ‘work’ and celebrating it with performances in our studio. This was before the vintage thing had become mainstream. Talking about things traditionally associated with women was still seen as naff. If you said you liked knitting, or baking, you were looked down on, often by other women, because the need to be more masculine in order to gain equality was the only way back then.

Back in 2000 there was a ladette culture, you could be a ‘geezer bird’ or heroine chic, and the size 0 had just become a thing, with our Fifties look we just didn’t fit into that. And we were having a nightmare getting funding as we weren’t quite theatre, and we weren’t quite performance art. One woman from Arts Admin said to me that I hadn’t suffered enough for my art, which is interesting because she had no idea about my life. We weren’t wrathful enough, weren’t rageful enough. We were making celebratory, sensual, and cheeky things about women and that was seen as trivial.

Warren Dent, who took over the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, was working in a studio next door to us. They were putting on shows like Whoopee, which was one of the first Burlesque nights in London of the Neo Burlesque era. The first time I saw that show, I was quite shocked by the striptease element of some of the acts. I saw myself as an artist, a performer, an actress, and, there used to be an attitude that once you’ve started taking your clothes off it’s hard to be taken seriously. I was quite conflicted, because I immediately loved burlesque. I just thought it was incredible, these women and their freedom to be fabulous, the performance training I had came from there had to be so much context

and proving yourself. So, seeing this new world, where you could just ‘be’, where you didn’t have to have a thesis to make art, was liberating.

In 2007, I did a course that taught you how to create work inspired by what moves you. The idea was that you create a state of being, that creates the actions, that create the result. I chose to create a live event. Working in burlesque, and teaching performing arts, I wanted to do something for women that allowed them to feel inspired, empowered, and have fun. So, I set up a one-day event, a burlesque hen party. It was called The Cheek of It! I didn’t have a hen, but I set it up anyway, a bit like Field of Dreams – if you build it, people will come. Lo and behold, somebody found out about it, called me and said, ‘I’ve heard you’re doing this and I’m organising a hen-do, can I book it?’

It was a huge success. The magical part is that the day was all about her. We taught the hen and her friends a routine and then halfway through the day said, ‘Okay, taxis are arriving and we’re going down to a real burlesque club and you’re going to perform!’ It was at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and Warren was incredibly supportive – anything went at that point! There were twenty in the group, and the theme was ‘A Cautionary Tale’, because the hen in this case was pregnant. No one in the audience knew that these women weren’t part of the show. The girls loved it, and some wanted to come back and do it again. Quite quickly, we had another one and a third, so it became an ongoing project, and I thought I’d extend it to become an eight-week course. That was fifteen years ago.

The key words on the course have remained inspiration, empowerment, and fun. It is my belief that every woman deserves to have those things in her life. Growing up, my mum taught me so much about the power of feminine energy. Feeling good about being a woman has been natural for me. I wanted to pass on this wisdom because for many, many women there is so much shame and guilt around enjoying and celebrating their bodies. But as the courses progressed, I noticed something else happening, women were having far bigger results in their lives than just learning a new style of performance or even increased body confidence. That was always the intention, but I had no idea to what extent it would happen. They were doing things like changing relationships, or changing careers all in line with what empowered them. Deep healing was occurring, numerous students were telling me about how they’d been through trauma or abuse, and how this was the first

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time they’d been able to look at themselves in the mirror or be comfortable with their bodies.

I remember one incredible story about a woman who’d had something awful happen to her. She said that after that event she would walk down the street and not feel present, she couldn’t feel her feet on the ground, she was just not alive in that sense. And then she did her first burlesque performance, and after that she felt grounded once more, because she felt at home in her body again.

This is truly powerful, and it isn’t just about learning burlesque, though burlesque is amazing. There’s something else, we’re providing a safe space for all those who identify as women, to play with their sensuality and express their femininity, because it still isn’t okay in loads of areas to be feminine: if men are too feminine it’s not okay, if boys are too feminine it’s not okay, if women are too feminine it’s not okay. Deep within all of us is the idea that ‘girly’ is a criticism – run like a girl. Why say it as if it’s a bad thing?

If we can become ourselves through dance, celebration, and laughter, that’s empowering. What we’re doing is giving women permission to be feminine and feminist. For too long in order to gain equality we’ve had to abandon the feminine in ourselves.

Firstly, it’s you the performer making the work while surrounded by a group of like-minded women. I believe in a girl-gang, it’s empowering, I really believe in the power of women, of sisterhood. I’m one of eight sisters so it’s kind of a gift I was given. On the course we ask you to start working from a different part of yourself. When women first come to us, they often think, ‘I need to fix myself, I need to become sexier, prettier, more or less of something’, whatever that is. We discourage that. We start with where you are and what you find inspiring and take it from there. We do that through performance and play, and you can’t play on your own, you need others. And from the sisterhood comes a sense of community.

There are lots of burlesque courses that don’t end with a performance, though for me getting up on stage is an integral part. You can still get incredible results from just learning every week with a group of women, but the moment you step out on stage you are transformed. There are few events in your life that transform your reality, where you are a different person before and after. There’s an alchemy that happens in that moment and the audience bears witness. I’m reluctant to say that the audience is not the most important element in this process, but it’s kind of true.

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APPENDIX

Below is a list of resources, clubs, shows, schools that you might find useful. By including organisations in this list it is not meant to suggest that we have ever worked together, or that they advocate this work, but that they are perceived to be decent and honest organisations.

SCHOOLS

The Cheek Of It cheekofit.co.uk

House of Burlesque www.houseofburlesque.co.uk

Phoxy Qurvy @schoolofburly

SHOWS

Big Band Burlesque bigbandburlesque.com

The Cocoa Butter Club thecocoabutterclub.com

Gin House Burlesque ginhouseburlesque.com

The Bitten Peach thebittenpeach.com

The Lads Show theladsshow.com

Club Pussy Liquor linktr.ee/pxssyliquor

Bar Wotever woteverworld.com

The Cherry Poppers Burlesque @cherrypoppersburlesque

Savage & Sons @savageandsons

CLUBS

Cellar Door cellardoor.biz

Fontaine’s fontaines.bar

Toulouse Lautrec toulouselautrec.co.uk

Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club workersplaytime.net

Phoenix Arts Club phoenixartsclub.com

CHARITIES

Cabaret vs Cancer cabaretvscancer.co.uk

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