The Legendary Bonnie Black and Back to the Strip Club
So, what is the key difference
between performing aerial acrobatics and stripping? Only one simple word,
according to Bonnie Black. Swap dance for
fitness and you have yourself one
legitimate physical art form. And I don’t think she is too wrong; the
acrobatics, contortion and gravity defiance from the Grease performance wouldn’t be out of place in circus arts, if it
weren’t for the stripper connotations. But, unlike her students, Bonnie does
not feel the need to separate herself from strip culture because she once played
a large role in the stripping culture of Dunedin, and is set to again.
Bonnie has been working as a
stripper and pole fitness performer for over five years, beginning her
stripping career in Dunedin before jumping the ditch to work in an upmarket
Melbourne club. When she returned to Dunedin she decided that it was time to
share her knowledge and skills with others, and opened up “Vertical Aerial
Dance” studio during a time where pole fitness was even more seeped in
controversy than it is now. She explained to me that before she opened her
fitness studio, most pole dance classes acted as strip club recruitment
agencies, and focused more on bum wiggles than shoulder mounts and inverted hip
holds. Now she runs over 10 classes a week with help from her second teacher,
Amanda, as well as organise annual large scale shows and private tutoring. She
is known around Dunedin as one of the best and most brutal teachers around, and
she is in constant demand from dancers of all backgrounds for strength and
flexibility training, making her particularly tricky to get an interview with.
After an hour of sipping coffee and reading beat up, out of date photography
magazines, Bonnie finally rolls in to a central cafe where we organised to meet
with her long brown hair draped over her comfy jumper, complimented with track
pants and running shoes. Quite a contrast to her usual spangly lycra stage
attire, although her stretchy pants suggest that she is ready to perform feats
of flexibility at any time. But far from the glamorous rehearsals or dance
practice her clothing suggests, she has in fact been gardening with her
parents. We begin by talking about them, and she tells me that her mother
pushed her and her sisters into ballet at a young age: “My mum was very
conservative, she always wanted me to be a ‘ballet dancer.’” She draws out the
words ‘ballet dancer’ as if they were tinged with lemon juice. But despite her
mothers’ vision of “Swan Lake” and The
Royal New Zealand Ballet, Bonnie had other plans for her dance knowledge.
She goes on to tell me of a one
of her most consistently well received routines in her repertoire. Bonnie would
leave the conventional Stiletto shoes in the dressing room and perform an
entire strip routine on point. The performance was a crowd favourite would
often inspire women to “punch their boyfriends in the ribs and yell ‘tip her’!”
I don’t ask why the women couldn’t
simply tip Bonnie themselves, although I suspect that the g-string acting as a
wallet may have something to do with it. Bonnie and a group of fellow
professionally trained dancers self-proclaimedly “brought the club out of the gutter”.
She explains that to her, stripping just felt like a performance of any other;
no shame or guilt necessary. Dancing is dancing, as far as Bonnie is concerned,
and if one does it with skill, expresses themselves, indulges in their love of
dance and manages to go home every
night with hundreds of dollars in their well manicured hand, then why should it
matter if they were wearing a tutu or nipple tassels? The distance that Bonnie
now keeps between herself and stripping is for the sole benefit of her pole
fitness students, not herself. In fact, coming back to Dunedin and setting up
the pole fitness studio has not caused a clear break from stripping for Bonnie
at all. She continues to perform at strip shows and performs with “Exotic
Burlesque” troupe, but under the strict direction that the name of her studio
is never used to promote the event. Mere weeks before our interview, Bonnie had
been recruited to be the dance manager of a new club opening in Dunedin, and
she took it with avid excitement as well as professionalism.
While stripping, when examined
through a feminist lens, is quite obviously a dance form infused with gender
power imbalances and objectification, feminists have forgotten one very
important thing; the power of the stage. John Berger[1],
an art critic and important figure in feminist theories of the male gaze, says
that “the be nude is to be in disguise,” meaning that the social construction
of the female nude body turns that body into a thing and not a person. This
could be seen as a very negative process for women, but in the world of
stripping, disguise is essential. The stage creates this disguise. What the
audience sees is not the woman revealed, but her disguise; the woman retains ownership
over her real body, its authentic movements, reactions, spontaneity and
sexuality, rather than the cartoon sexuality displayed on the stripper’s stage.
The stage is a place of power and control; you are physically and
psychologically elevated over the audience. Whether you are there out of
economic necessity, like Lexie, or for artistic expression like Bonnie, when
you are on the stage every movement and action is infused with the power of the
stage. A mere step or flick of the wrist becomes an action of performance, a
beautiful and powerful gesture of expression and talent. It is when strippers
come off the stage that the real power imbalances begin, which is where the
real difference comes in strip culture for fun and stripping for a living: the
dancer is forced to exit the powerful stage and wonder the seedy realm of the
audience, where her psychological and physical dominance is, excuse the pun,
stripped from her.
Well, maybe not entirely. As Bonnie
Black so eloquently words it “I don’t know why anyone would fuck with a
stripper! Those massive seven inch heels make good goddamn weapons. Don’t fuck
with a stripper!” Good advice, I’ll make sure to head it in future. But even
Bonnie, whose tough words and even tougher teaching regimes leave many students
and performers shaking with fear, has received her fair share of inappropriate
behaviour in her time as a stripper. Gropings, grabbings and humiliation are
still common place in a stripper’s working life.
Back in the strip club changing room I end up
talking to Serenity, one of the most talented dancers of the night, about her
experiences with audiences and power. Staring into a glaringly lit mirror, she
applies her heavy make-up while enthusiastically delving into the various ways
in which occupying the stage and excelling as a dancer has not merely boosted
her confidence; it gave her confidence when she had had none at all. Outside of
her stripping role, Serenity is a self-confessed tomboy and being in this line
of work has put her in touch with a feminine beauty that she felt she was
missing from her life. However, looking the part of girly-girl may elevate her
esteem, but playing the part is a different matter. Despite her skills as a
dancer and her strength in the pole moves, she finds it hard to entice tips once
she enters into the audience because she just can’t put on the passive girl
act. “I can’t just be like “fuck you,” she says. And to myself, I wonder, what
it is exactly that the audience members are doing to warrant a firm and final
‘fuck off’? And what are the effects on Serenity, this normally strong and
vocal women, when the stripping role forces her to be silent? She tells me that
stripping has made her a “nicer person,” but is being forced to lower personal
boundaries and limits really what constitutes pleasantness? Or is it subservience?
The strength and dominance afforded to the dancer by the stage and by the
strength exhibited on the pole must be
undone once she exits the stage by playing into every sickening stereotype of
femininity; passivity, sexual availability and ‘lady-like’ manners. On the
stage, the stripper maintains power through the stage disguise; but when the
dancer descends the stage she descends into a social climate of objectification
and male power, into a realm where humiliation and violation are standard and
even expected. Their heels may be 7 inch weapons, but the politics of the
stripper’s vocation rarely allows her the chance to wield them.
Conclusion
As I delved deeper into the world of
strippers, I attempted to challenge my own prejudices as well as those of
society at large. As a woman and a feminist, I attempted to put myself in the
strippers towering shoes and understand how things look from the top of the
waxed pole. And, in the end, the view wasn’t so bad. Women were finding their
self confidence in Burlesque, challenging their bodies and minds through pole
fitness and carving new and interesting paths for themselves as strippers. So
when, towards the end of my research, I was asked to join the team at Bonnie’s
new club, I didn’t think that it would be such a big deal. I thought that I
could check it out and assess this new situation with the clarity of a person
that was well informed and un-tinged by foundation-less prejudice. I walk into
the new club on the day of its opening night. The familiar smell of saw dust
dominates the room as masses of people frantically clean and organise in
preparation for the big night. I look around, and in the empty seats people
materialise, drinks in hands. The boom of male laughter echoes around the
wooden walls. Sticky, glass covered floors and vibrating pop music fills the
silent air; I am transported back to every moment in my life that has been
dominated with masculine ickyness; every cat call aimed at me while I mind my
own business in the streets; every seedy man in every bar that feels I owe them
a conversation; every creep on the bus who walks past row after empty row to
sit next to me. And it is at this moment that I know I can’t be a stripper. And
I know that I have always known this. After months or writing, investigating
and forging relationships with women in Dunedin’s strip culture, was my own
reluctance to participate a hypocritical one? Was everything that I had been
writing, been thinking, a lie?
The problem is not stripping. The
problem is that stripping does not end when you leave the club. The traits of
femininity, as forged in a patriarchal culture, that strippers are expected to
fill- subservience, sexual availability and hegemonic feminine appearance- are not
isolated to the working woman. These are the traits that every woman is expected to fulfil; the stripper simply embodies the
expectations on us all. So yes, stripping (like advertising, pornography, film
and fine art) contributes to maintaining this patriarchal culture in which we
live. While the stripper is expected to fulfil the oppressive restrictions of
femininity that place women in subordination to men, the frame of the strip
club will always be that of disrespect. What burlesque and pole fitness
illustrate is that erotic expression and an erotics of disrespect do not need
to go hand in hand; dancer’s from both disciplines demand respect while
expressing their sexuality and creativity on a stage that retains the power of
the performer. An erotic aesthetic based on dignity is, in my opinion, not at
all out of the question. I think, for the sake of erotic performers and for the
larger relations of women to men both broadly and intimately, we need to
embrace and popularise a sexual gaze that is not a disrespecting gaze- what is
needed is an erotics of respect.
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