Stripping...for Fun?
Sexual pouting lips? Check.
Sequin encrusted costumes? Check? Removing these costumes? Check. No, this
isn’t a stripper’s dressing room, but could be any burlesque performance around
the world at this point in time. Or, as I experience, any Burlesque dance
class. As costuming is such an important aspect of the art form, beginner
classes spend almost as much time talking about where to buy corsets as how to
step, together, step. Burlesque is credited as the mother of modern stripping,
but after its many revivals, what we are seeing today is an interesting domestification
of burlesque dance. What was once so shocking about burlesque has become
relatively mundane (oh no, don’t remove that glove! What would your mother say?)
As a do-it-yourself burlesque revival storms the western world, burlesque
classes and shows are popping up everywhere. Women from all walks of life have
joined classes and performed on stage in the burlesque tradition, not only
volunteering their bodies for the gaze, but sacrificing time, money and energy
to do it. All around the world woman have reclaimed burlesque for themselves,
and Dunedin is one of the leading small cities in this trend.
But are these women simply
passive dupes of a patriarchal system? Or are they the powerful, hot young
things of Brown’s Cosmopolitan world?
As I get to know more of the women involved in Burlesque, I realise that they
are neither. Take 48 year old Debbe; I met Debbe over the scramble for sequins
in a class run by nation-wide burlesque brand Hootchy Kootchy, one of the most
commercially successful burlesque groups in Dunedin. Debbe has been attending
burlesque classes for only six weeks at the time of my visit, but she’s been
involved in feminism for a lot longer than that. Growing up, she had four
sisters and a mother who was active at the height of second wave feminism; avid
sing alongs to “I am Woman, Hear me Roar” were common place for Debbe growing
up. The effect of this feminist upbringing remain strong: “I actively try not
to limit choices for myself or bow to societal norms. I have been referred to as a ‘boundary
pusher’ which was intended as a negative trait but I have accepted it as a
compliment.” She writes in an email after we meet. She confesses that she is
selective about who she tells about her new found hobby, however, for fear of
having to explain and justify her choices. And it is not only Burlesque dancers
that fear the judgement of others because of their stripper related activities.
“It’s Just Aerial
Acrobatics!” Pole dance and pole fitness.
There is an ever pervasive
misconception that stripper’s poles are greasy, but ask yourself this; how
could anyone hang upside down from a steel pole 6cm in diameter using only the
crease of their leg if said pole was covered in grease? The reality is the
exact opposite of this misconception; pole dancers’ poles are waxed. The first time I ever saw pole
dance was, in fact, thanks to the very process of waxing poles, or more
specifically the time that it takes to wax a pole. During pole dance shows,
there is an awkward gap of three of four minutes while the poles undergo
maintenance for the next set of performances, and a successful Dunedin pole
dance studio recruited some circus performers and I to fill in the gaps (by
night I swap my writers pen for belly dance bra and belt, in case you were
wondering). I parade around the stage, always looking out my peripherals to
make sure I was not about to smack into
a pole or a person, while women in black shorts and bare feet crawl up poles,
fire-man style, coating them with large white candles. I shimmy and shake and
spangle my little heart out, but as I look out to the audience I meet no one’s
gaze. I sit back in the audience to watch the rest of the show, when one kindly
audience member turns to me and says: “Don’t worry about it love; you tried
your best.” Outshined by a pole monkey.
But it is no wonder that I was
not impressing anyone in that particular audience. These women show strength
and gravity defiance that most of us common folk could only dream of, and that’s
just the pole management team. Recently I was asked to yet again distract an
audience-who-needs-no-distraction as the studio puts on a huge four night
production of everyone’s favourite, secretly dirty, musical Grease. I pop along to their dress
rehearsal to scope out the stage and to chat with the performers.
The thing that strikes me is the
sound. Across the studio screeches the sound of flesh simultaneously gripping
and sliding across metal. It sounds like a pain verging on torture, but when I
ask some of the dancers about it they unanimously answer that it sounds much
more painful than it really is. There are plenty of other moves that do cause
pain, but I am told that they are the silent ones. As Irene, a blonde with a slightly
vacant look in her eyes, tells me with a laugh: “If you don’t like pain, don’t
do pole dancing”. Am I in a room full of masochists, I wonder? But here pain is
not so much enjoyed as it is a symbol of dedication, of working hard towards
training the body and accomplishing physical goals. The dancers wear their
bruises like girl-guide badges; if they could clip them to a ribbon, I’m sure
they would.
Among the women at the studio,
there is unquestioned respect for the physical achievements of themselves and
each other; but outside the studio, it is a different story. Almost everyone I
talk to has someone in their lives that disapproves, and are forced to spend a
lot of time explaining and justifying their hobby to strangers. Resistant or
unsupportive family and friends find it difficult to be persuaded without
seeing the show for themselves, and unanimously switch camps once they do. The
symbol of the pole and its associations with stripping are so strong that it
takes concrete visual evidence to persuade people that a pole can be danced on
without all the performer’s clothes ripping themselves from their body.
Most of the girls I talk to at the
dress rehearsal set themselves in fierce opposition to strippers; the
suggestion that they may be in stripper territory visibly upsets and angers
them. But Bonnie Black, the founder of this very studio, has a very different
although equally fierce take on this binary. When Bonnie auditioned for “New
Zealand’s Got Talent,” a derivative of the American television program which
acts primarily as a glorified High School talent show, earlier this year, she
was furious at presenter Dei Henwood when he announced that “the stripper” had
made it into the second round. “Thanks for calling me a stripper in front of my
fucking parents” she says about Henwood to me over coffee. She continues, “If
you want me to strip for you, then I’ll strip. But don’t call me a stripper
when I’m doing pole fitness; that’s a totally different thing.”
See you next week for more on the legendary Bonnie Black and my final thoughts in stripping for work and leisure in a post-feminist era!
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