Getting a Leg Up

Just for kicks, imagine New York City, 1868: The bustling center of American culture abounded with theaters, P.T. Barnum-esque museums of curiosities, and the middle and upper classes whose sensibilities these entertainments are offended. British burlesque star Lydia Thompson and her sensual troupe, the British Blondes—short skirts and satirical skits in tow—stepped off their ship and into a foreign country teetering on the cultural waves of a nation in flux.

Though the Blondes dazzled the theatrical scene in their day, the descendents of what is now “classic burlesque” were soon relegated to the bottom rungs of tasteless, tassled, low brow entertainment, stripped of their creative liberties, and rather formulaically cast as realizations of male fantasy.

Over 140 years later, the creativity of burlesque has made a return farther up the coast in Boston, whose rich downtown theater district had, by the 1960s, devolved into “The Combat Zone”—a red light district of adult entertianment known for the sort of smutty striptease taht the world “burlesque” has been known to bring to mind. With the very popular holiday burlesque “The Slutcracker” now selling out shows at the Somerville Theatre and burlesque performances popping up around the area—increasingly with the support of the American Repertory Theatre’s Club Oberon—the comedic performance of strip tease is being revived to engage the short attention spans of a varied contemporary audience out more for social issues and sheer spectacle than simply flesh.

KICK START

“What does it mean to be a woman?” asks University of North Carolina professor Robert C. Allen, recounting the questions of gender that faced 19th century America. “What’s the nature of femininity?”

An historian of American Studies, Allen’s “Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture” is one of the leading discussions on the history of 19th- and 20th-century leg shows and the spectacle of the body.

“As burlesque becomes a working class form, the rich, multi-dimensional nature of traditional burlesque—women performing satirical plays in rhinestone couplets... [and] dressing up as men—that begins to fall away,” Allen says, “and what you’re left with is the display of the sexualized female body in motion.”

By 1937, the original burlesque—with its masculine mockery, scandalously underdressed women, and working class reputation—fell out of favor.

“[Then-New York City mayor Fiorello H.] LaGuardia basically said, ‘You can’t call anything burlesque in New York,’” Allen explains. “And New York being the theatrical hub, burlesque really folds.”

Of course, perceived social stigma is less of a deterrent now. Those seeking a strip show head to gentlemen’s clubs, not theaters.

“If they’re going to go see titties, they’re going to go to a titty bar,” says Vanessa “Sugar Dish” White, the mastermind behind “The Slutcracker,” which opens Dec. 10. A classically trained ballerina for 20 years, White entered the burlesque scene after an injury ended her ballet career; her cleverly-titled 40-person production is the redirection of her creative vision for the performance of movement.

According to Allen, a contemporary emphasis on expression rather than on simply dollars and cents has helped revive what had become more a business than an art form in the 20th century, allowing performers more control of their routines.

White’s show, for example, which uses the original Tchaikovsky “Nutcracker” score, returns to some of the theatrical elements of early theater in a way that is unusually expressive. “[M]y dancers, instead of just being these images on the stage, [are] allowed to engage with audience,” White says. “...Wink at people, stick their tongue out.”

And though it might seem blasphemous to some to appropriate the classic performance for a more scantily clad cast, Oberon producer Randy Weiner, the director and creator of “The Donkey Show,” notes that the same cries were made about the transplantation of Shakespeare into street gang life when “West Side Story” first opened.

For a modern audience generally jaded by the sex on TV and detached as a result of technology, burlesque possesses interactive appeal even while maintaining creative finesse.

“Burlesque show is an unusual beast in that it’s neither a ballet—100% dance—or a play,” says Alex “Scratch” Newman, manager of the established burlesque troupe Boston Babydolls. “There’s dance elements to it and less of a plot. It’s a balancing act and it’s a skill to pull together a good burlesque show.”

Members of Harvard’s theatrical and dance communities are also aware of this, and have begun to take steps to bring burlesque into the mainstream and into the campus dance community. For example, classically trained ballerina Marin J. Orlosky ’07-’08, a dance associate at the Office for the Arts’ Dance Program—which supports student dance groups and offers classes—developed an interest in circus arts as a teenager, which inspired time off to perform in this non-traditional arena. Most recently, she performed as the aerialist in the Loeb Mainstage production, “Momentum.”

Working within both the classical and non-traditional dance communities, Orlosky supports the validity of burlesque’s performative artistic value, despite its display of bare chests and shoulders.

“[W]hat I’ve seen as more transgressive elements have been not so much the sexy part but more the character content,” Orlosky says, referring to one of the more hilarious acts that she’s seen, “I think a whole lot of people have more problems with dressing up as schoolgirls and then one of them being crucified with glitter.”

And though not all burlesque performances try to be as controversial in terms of subject material, the freedom that the art provides and the controversies inherent in its form are enough to have Weiner very enthusiastic.

“I think it’s so exciting that the A.R.T. is so supportive of this,” he says regarding upcoming burlesque performances and the current talks with area burlesque troupes to bring more to the theater. “I think it’s so exciting that Harvard is so supportive of this.”

RAISING A BROW

Amongst the oddities surrounding Shakespearen disco “The Donkey Show,” Club Oberon’s first production of the new season, was the breasts. There was nothing out of the ordinary about them in and of themselves, but what they represented, as they danced above and through the unusual nightclub-style audience protected by the gently flapping wings of their butterfly pasties, was a shift. The A.R.T. would be doing things a little bit differently this year.

Those pasties—stickers carefully placed over a topless woman’s nipples during some types of performances, typically burlesque—would not be the last to come through that theater space this year. On December 4, the Boston Babydolls will fill the space with “V for Vixen,” a U.S.O.-style burlesque tribute to the nation’s armed forces, and talks are in the works of bringing more of the art form to the space on Arrow Street.

“[W]hen you say burlesque, you think girls taking off their clothes, and it means so much more than that,” says Ari Barbanell, director of special projects for Club Oberon. “It’s about variety shows. It’s about comedy. It’s about music.”

And, to some extent, it’s about finding a venue willing to let a troupe perform. With a decades and decades long reputation as being simply a sort of smutty striptease, Boston burlesque troops sometimes lack the funds or the street credentials to secure venues or even their own space to rehearse. When the Boston Babydolls moved into a dance studio in Quincy over a year ago, they were greeted by suspicion and accusation; the City Councilor for their particular area of the town, Brian F. McNamee, compared their appearance to the beginnings of Boston’s erstwhile “Combat Zone.” “The Combat Zone started out with innocent burlesque,” the Boston Globe quoted McNamee in April, “and then the next thing you know, there’s striptease, prostitutes, drugs, and pimps.”

If “The Donkey Show” was any indication, this is not necessarily a crowd the Oberon staff is adverse to, even if they did believe that it’s the type a burlesque troupe would attract—which they don’t. By encouraging and inviting troupes to perform there, they hope that the high quality theater space and audio and lighting equipment will lend burlesque troupes not only the proper materials to create their spectacles but also some artistic legitimacy. And while “The Slutcracker” has had success at the Somerville Theatre, the performers in the show do not derive from one troupe, but many various ones, which on their own, do not have their own performance spaces.

“[‘The Slutcracker’] was fantastic and what they did that was so brilliant was put together all these troops... [but] the problem with Somerville Theater is that that’s not a home,” says Oberon producer Randy Weiner. “And what we’re try to give them a home.”

IT TAKES ALL KINDS

A motley crowd, contemporary burlesque troops vary locally and nationally in terms of content and approach.

“[T]here are a lot of different styles of burlesque, even in Boston,” says Mr. Scratch, the stage name for the manager of the Boston Babydolls. “Some of them are more nostalgic and some of them take classic burlesque as a jumping off point for a modern audience.”

And, as Professor Allen observed at the Burlesque Hall of Fame convention in Las Vegas last year, that modern message and that modern audience can take as many forms as the people composing it.

“[W]hat’s going on with burlesque today is really, really interesting... because it’s driven by women and it’s driven by performance and it’s going on on different levels in all kinds of different places,” he says. “Burlesque is tapping into a gay performance culture, it’s tapping into a male performance culture... a lesbian performance culture. It’s tapping into performance art... and pin-up culture. It’s going in a lot of different ways, but the anchor is that they revolve around the body, the performed body, and the sexuality around the performed body.”

But while it may seem as though an interest in burlesque suggests a degree of comfort with the exposed body, an ideological shift in attitude toward sex is unlikely.

“I think what is removed is an anxiety around a very specific presentation of sex,” says Eugene Tan, community engagement director of The Theater Offensive, which recently presented the 18th annual Queer Theater Festival, “Out on The Edge.” “I think a lot of burlesque is interested in a very polished version of sex and in that way it’s related to sex.”

The variety show format still allows, however, for a variety in reception, from the academic assessment of its cultural significance to the performative success; from the show’s intended political or social message to its raw entertainment value.

“What’s so cool about burlesque... is that you can take it anywhere,” Weiner says. “[Burlesque and variety shows] are just three minutes—like little poems—and you can interpret it however you want.”

—Staff writer Beryl C.D. Lipton can be reached at blipton@fas.harvard.edu.