REVIEW\ RISQUÉ BUSINESS
Most weekends, somewhere in the city or suburbs, you can step back in time to the bawdy, glitzy days of burlesque entertainment. SARAH MARINOS talks to some of the people behind Melbourne’s growing love affair with the genre.
MELBOURNE’S
BURLESQ
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ulie Poulter remembers the first time she performed burlesque for an audience. It was at the Corner Hotel in Richmond and she was with friends who shared a love of 1950s vintage fashion, films and music. Dressed in towering heels, corsets and pastel-coloured baby dolls, they heard the music seeping through the hotel’s sound system. “I remember sitting on a chair, staring at the curtains just before they opened, wearing my corset and thinking, ‘How the hell did this happen’?” says Poulter, 32. “Then the curtains opened, the crowd started screaming and we just enjoyed the moment. It was a chance to wear beautiful costumes and to have a nice time. It was a one-off.”
Hi Ball Burlesque Eight years later Poulter, Anna Achia, 34, and Leah Gionis, 32, are known as Hi Ball Burlesque and are still donning feathers and fans and performing at the Red Door Burlesque evening at the Order of Melbourne. Burlesque has undergone a revival in Australia, with Melbourne seemingly at the epicentre. Poulter, aka Brandy Alexander, is an advertising copywriter; Gionis, Miss Rusty Nail, is a graphic designer; and Achia, Ms Muff y Manhattan, is a former public servant with the cemeteries and crematoria authority and who now runs a go-go dancing academy. “Everyone thought I was mad when I left the
public service,” says Achia, laughing while sipping coffee in an East Brunswick cafe. While the Saturday afternoon crowd kicks back in jeans and jumpers, Achia, Poulter and Gionis have stepped out of a 1950s fashion catalogue. Rouge and red lipstick are mandatory and so are carefully curled hair, pencil skirts, cinched waists, twin sets and jewellery with just the right amount of bling.
From rules and regulations to rhinestones “But I was living in two different worlds,” says Achia. “During the day I’d talk regulations in the cemeteries and crematoria industry and during the evening it was burlesque and rhinestones.” The trio met at swing dancing evenings around Melbourne and discovered they shared a passion for the 1950s, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, cocktail dresses, rockabilly and rhinestones. Gionis says: “We’d often talk about how burlesque was coming back in the States. We loved the glamour of it and would say it was just a matter of time before someone in Australia did it. And then we thought, ‘Why don’t we give it a try?’ It let us take our love for vintage glamour up a notch.” A second show in the city proved to them that burlesque was really back. Poulter says: “We were downstairs in the changing room and didn’t realise the queue to get in stretched down ACDC Lane. The police were called because there were people everywhere.” On a typical night the Hi Ball audience includes young couples, professionals, groups