Since the 1990s, burlesque performance has undergone a series of revivals and reinterpretations. This has been driven by several, often competing, factors, and hence agreement over the nature of burlesque remains difficult to attain.

A (totally false and misleading) popular assumption that feminism was ‘anti-sex’ and ‘anti-pleasure’ (despite the boasts of Germaine Greer at having seduced half of London between composing feminist criticism and establishing herself as a celebrated career-journalist and author) has meant that many people have seized on burlesque as a manner of celebrating strip-tease as an antidote to such attitudes; as a way for women to reclaim their sexuality—not that they ever really lost it, of course, but burlesque is a useful form for such projects, even if you are not Dita Von Teese!

Gay, queer and lesbian performers have seized on the manner in which burlesque seems to turn sexuality itself into a kind of fabulous fiction—was the divine Mae West, for example, ever really anything but a fantastic construction of impossible femininity, almost literally poured into and shaped by her dresses and wigs, rather than actually representing any vaguely realistic version of what a woman or a woman’s body might be? It is a shame in this regard no one has thought to use one of West’s own self-penned plays like Sex or The Drag as the basis of a modern revue.

The third element which has had some impact upon Auckland company The Dust Palace is the so-called New Circus movement (Circus Oz, Archaos, Club Swing, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Pickle Family, and to a lesser extent Cirque de Soleil). In this style of post-1970s circus, the genre became less associated with extraordinary physical feats or animal acts, and more linked with dramatic revues and cabaret—including those cabaret acts once commonplace within the carnivals which circus performers often toured with back in the day.

These included early burlesque, strip-tease, and the so-called ‘kooch’ or ‘hoochie koochie’ shows (risqué fan-dancing, known to anyone who watched the TV series Carnivale). New Circus artists reunited circus of today with some of these historic antecedents. The famous trapeze artist Léotard, dressed in his own, patented and outrageously revealing body-stocking, had after all performed within those music halls which hosted burlesque and line dancing, whilst Edouard Manet’s famous painting Un bar chez les Folies bergères shows the legs of one of the venue’s more risqué acrobatic acts behind the somewhat bemused bar-maid in the foreground.

The Dust Palace’s artistic director, Eve Gordon, draws sporadically on all of these ideas in her production Burlesque As You Like It (Not a Family Show). Audiences are presented, for example, with a high-camp, bisexual (or at least cross-dressing) MC in the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, played with much charisma—if little sense of threat—by Campbell Farquhar.

Considerable variation in style, physique and race is offered amongst our four main female strip-tease performers. There is the willowy Eve herself, who only offers such a piece late during the show, largely to effect a joke around the initial concealment and subsequent revelation of her genitalia. Though slightly upstaged when Eve comes on immediately after her, Nisha Madhan appears several times beforehand as a good natured, seductive but clumsy stripper whose attempts to disrobe herself are frustrated by her clothes. Compared to Gordon, Madhan relies more on comedy, and also upon that technique made famous by Gypsy Rose Lee, of only revealing very little in order to arouse and keep the attention of her audience.

Colleen Davis, who begins the show with her recreation of a smoky, torch-singer-style lounge song, does an impressive reverse strip-tease, initially appearing naked upon a darkened stage, her virtue protected by a number of white gloved hands from unseen men hidden amongst the shadows behind her and whose fingers flutter around, barley concealing her anatomy. Her handy helpers then slowly dress her generous form, whilst caressing and drawing attention to her curves and features.

In contrast to Gordon’s athletic, highly defined and muscled form—an impressive product of Gordon’s other role on stage as the main acrobat and aerialist—Madhan and Davis hark back to when burlesque’s performers signified their sexual potency in part by their luxurious occupation of space and mass. The burlesque revival tends to celebrate these qualities also, reminding one of the desirability of bodies which have not been energetically sculpted, made hard, and rendered increasingly slight through the use of gyms, weight-training, diets and other approaches (invaluable and sexy though such techniques might be to those who wish to avail themselves of them).

This accent on the sensuality of divergent body types extends to Sarah Houbout, a diminutive performer with a pate adorned with scattered wisps of hair rather than locks per se, who offers a fairly straightforward strip in the guise of a housewife whose recently returned husband pays her little attention. Houbout sheds her dress to reveal a metallic bikini, before then divesting her partner of his own shirt, and projecting sparks and hot iron filings onto his chest from an angle-grinder which she applies to her own groin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is again Farquhar who plays this role, his function within the show apparently being to occupy the more kinky male parts.

In common with other organisations like Sugar Blue Burlesque in West Australia (http://www.sugarblueburlesque.com/), the Dust Palace offer workshops to the general public as a means of self-realisation and self-expression. Burlesque As You Like It is therefore, in many ways, a live public expression of this ideal. Quality of execution is not always the central focus. Indeed, in the case of Madhan’s performance, it is expressly not what is being aimed at (although Madhan’s quality of comedic execution is nevertheless assured). The aim is rather to generate a sex-positive community of diverse individuals, and in this, Burlesque As You Like It is eminently successful. 

As befits such a shambolic, highly diverse, and deliberately episodic form as burlesque (early burlesque shows included tap dancing, acrobatics, line dancing, solo strips, spoken-word comedy duos, men playing saws or gum-leaves, and just about everything else besides), Gordon has leavened these more sexual or dramatic acts with more abstract sequences. At one point, a naked performer serves as a screen for the projection of a hand-scratched, abstract film sequence such as Len Lye and Stan Brakhage once produced. Gordon herself sees this as suggesting a critique of bodily objectification; as showing a body turned into nothing more than a screen, leading this individual to rebel against her own objectification when she finally runs off. 

Given how lyrically attractive and beautiful these moving lines of filmic abstraction were, I would argue instead that the piece functions more to highlight the age-old link between the physical gesture of the artist—the hand that holds the pen or the paintbrush—and how art creation has always had a deeply physical aspect, be it in the sensual impressions and physical desires summoned up in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (his famous tea-cake or madeleine), or Pollock’s drip paintings (where he literally strode above, over and within his horizontally arrayed canvas, physically merging with and acting on its form).

Another interesting sequence is where Gordon and Ascia Maybury, dressed in sparkling, silver bodysuits, entwine themselves together whilst curling about and between fabric hanging from above (a style of aerial work known as tissu). Mike Edward offers a commentary on their performance derived from a David Attenborough documentary, detailing copulation between a pair of hermaphroditic slugs. Although the synchronisation between movement and text could be tighter—the performers are very visibly not entwined about each other when Edward pronounces this particular description—this is nevertheless a pleasantly odd and suggestive interlude.

Ironically though, perhaps the most effective sequence is a highly homoerotic acrobatic duet between Edward and Ebon Grayman. Taught, pumped and topless, this section is frankly and unashamedly a display of beefcake of the first degree. Whilst most of the female performances seem imbued with some slight, niggling discomfort on the part of the artists about offering their bodies for the delectation of the audience seated before them, this discomfort being covered up or mitigated by humour, Edward and Grayman appeared to have no problem about getting their gear off and having audiences view them as highly pleasing meat.

This is not of course to denigrate the high level of skill demonstrated in the lifts which the two perform with each other. However what is notable here is how this means that every gesture, every physical strain and tremor of musculature, becomes almost hyper-infused with sexual frisson. I would suggest that even for heterosexual males in the audience, it is this scene which is the most sexy of all of those within Burlesque As You Like It. 

Gordon’s aesthetic is highly assured and successful in its own terms. No strong links between acts are established, but there is enough variation on display to satisfy most tastes, and any weaker pieces (such as a somewhat clumsily choreographed plastic surgery spoof) quickly vanish into memory. Audiences are titillated but not greatly challenged. There is none of the in-your-face, queer performance of New York’s Annie Sprinkle, Melbourne’s Moira Finucane (http://www.moirafinucane.com/) or Azaria Universe of the infamous women’s only nights Gurlesque, or of other similar radical approaches. Sexual objectification is invoked and played with, but not really effected, and so the comfort of the performers themselves, their sense of shared community with the audience, and their right to divergence, is celebrated throughout.

Whilst the musical numbers could have been more assured given the number of them which featured—the cast’s voices are somewhat variable (Davis is very good when standing, but less effective when her lungs are compressed by lying on a piano lid)—they nevertheless offer a pleasing addition. Even the odd real dud of a scene, like the attempt to orchestrate the audience to make origami genitalia, is done with sufficient good humour to be fun if not altogether effective.

The main issue would seem to be the title. Ultimately, where Gordon has been most effective is in referencing burlesque in a manner which is highly accessible to all, such that the form here becomes quite explicitly Burlesque: A Family Show. Nothing offensive appears, Gordon’s direction ensures that actual pornography (which is, after all, what burlesque was: aestheticised porn) never emerges, and sexual norms are not really challenged any more than by, say, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Tootsie or the American version of The Birdcage. 

This is all great fun, but I did find myself hankering after something more akin to the work of Pierre Molinier, Valerie Solanas, John Waters, Divine, the Mick Jagger film Performance, or the work of other artists whose take on sexual performance is more provocative. Even so, at least one reviewer of the Dust Palace’s previous productions has suggested that it is perhaps “vulgar to indorse [sic] such [playfully sexual or near pornographic] entertainment in … terrible economic times” (https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=2685)—possibly unaware of the highly political nature of pre- and post-Depression era cabaret in Germany, Austria and Switzerland from 1917-1933.

Irrespective of one’s reading of history and of the form, there is no doubt that burlesque has and probably will continue to divide audiences on quite how far it should or can go, so Gordon’s own handling of these debates represents a skilful, popular and gently thought-provoking (if far from radical) take on this long and complex tradition. 

For other perspectives on the Dust Palace by writers for ‘Theatreview,’ go to:
https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=1981
https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/production.php?id=1015
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