Newspaper Reporter tries Burlesque

[atmccloud]

Reporter Rosie Kinchen tries out burlesque

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1308544.ece

According to Private Eye magazine, she felt she was bullied into this and has complained to her employer's human resources department. So I guess she's embarassed...

Anyone have access to the article and video?

[Fango]

vimeo.com/74374905 - I found the video on Vimeo. Unfortunately, it's just more still photos of her performing, and nothing more revealing than underwear. There is video footage of another performer, though.

Originally Posted by atmccloud

According to Private Eye magazine, she felt she was bullied into this and has complained to her employer's human resources department.

Do you have a link to this article? Or if there is no link, maybe you could please transcribe it for us, if it's not too long.

Thanks/Enjoy

Fango

[enffer]

wow, that's a bra and a half!

[JoshuaClarke]

Unfortunately it's subscription only.

[pppooo]

SHOCK IT TO ME - Neo- burlesque is the mad, bad, subversive riposte to mainstream strip shows — and it's coming to a pub near you. Rosie Kinchen puts on her birthday suit and joins the fun
Sunday Times, The (London, England) - Sunday, September 8, 2013
Author: Rosie Kinchen
It's one of the hottest nights of the summer and I'm standing in a dressing room above a grimy pub in north London while two drag queens arrange the contents of my bra. Sadly, this isn't how I get dressed every day. If I'm completely honest, it isn't normally a three-man job.

Tonight, though, is anything but a normal night out. To begin with, there's the costume I'm wearing: a blonde wig, two dresses, a large pair of padded pants and a bra which easily accommodates my head in each cup (I know this, because I've spent much of the past week demonstrating it). Inside the bra it is a hoarder's paradise; there's loo roll, some car-wash sponges, teddy-bear stuffing, cotton wool and a pot of gold glitter. There is a good reason for this; I haven't just decided to save on plastic bags. In just over an hour I will be making my stage debut as a burlesque dancer — and there is not enough gin in all the world, let alone this pub, to calm my nerves.

Near me, other dancers are getting ready. In one corner is a woman dressed as a Harajuku girl in a lilac dress and matching wig, snarling at her own reflection in the mirror. In another, a go-go dancer anxiously repairs a homemade LED costume that earlier fused and burnt her in the crotch. I have triggered a furious debate by asking what I should do if one of my pasties — the stickers that burlesque dancers wear on their nipples — flies off during a routine. In this heat, even Superglue isn't guaranteed to grip.

Our venue has a nudity licence (an unlicensed nipple flash can result in a £20,000 fine), so Trixie Tassels, a straight-talking redhead who will perform a bump-and-grind belly dance, suggests pulling the other one off too. "It's the only way to maintain dignity," she concludes. Aurora Galore, a 23-year-old fire performer, who a little later tonight will burn off her clothes and regurgitate fake blood down her chest, disagrees. "I'm not a stripper," she snaps. "Just cover it with your hand."

Tonight's show may be billed as burlesque , but the fan dances, tassel twirls and vacant smiles that have recently become so popular are absent from the line-up. This is a new burlesque : subversive, satirical and mad as hell.

It has grown out of New York's performance-art scene and has now made its way across the Atlantic. The performers want to entertain but, more than that, they want to challenge, with routines that explore everything from gender stereotypes to bulimia, from body image to sexual exploitation. They may strip but they also call themselves feminists — and it won't be long before I'm unleashing my well-stuffed chest on stage alongside them.

I've seen countless burlesque shows in recent years; they've become very hard to avoid. Sequined breasts are in vogue and popping up — or out — everywhere from tea rooms to supper clubs, from festivals to exclusive West-End nightclubs. In the past few weeks both Princess Beatrice and Holly Willoughby, the daytime television presenter, have outed themselves as fans. Burlesque has done to stripping what glamping did to camping; it has taken a stale, down-at-heel pastime, given it a lick of paint, stuck on some pompoms and re-sold it to the middle classes as something glamorous.

The woman responsible is a performer called Dita Von Teese, real name Heather Sweet. Before she burst into the public consciousness in the early 2000s, we lived in a world devoid of titillating glove peels and suggestive winks. Burlesque had been driven to extinction by free love in the Sixties and the booming porn industry of the Seventies and Eighties.

Sweet started her career as a stripper, but saw a gap in the adult-entertainment market for some old-school glamour, and resurrected the classic showgirl routines of the 1950s. Her performances are spectacular, with tiny costumes and big props — her trademark is a giant martini glass which she bathes in on stage. She's also honed her body to look like the kind of doll that's popular with lonely men in China, with enhanced DD breasts and a waist squeezed down to 22in from years spent wearing a corset. Despite this, Von Teese's form of burlesque is marketed at women as well as men — a new form of female empowerment that lets us ladies explore our sexuality and boost our body confidence.

But as burlesque has moved into the mainstream, this has become harder to believe. I recently spent an evening at one of the most well-known burlesque chains for a night billed as a Blitz-themed cabaret. It felt more like I'd wandered into Beavers strip club in Watford. A woman with a body from the pages of Nuts magazine slowly writhed her way out of a sequined dinner jacket to the sound of You Can Keep Your Hat On — while tables of men in suits enthusiastically encouraged her to do exactly the opposite.

In its original form, burlesque had nothing to do with stripping. Ancient Greek stage burlesques were satires. The word comes from "burla", meaning joke in Italian, and even in its 19th-century incarnation burlesque was, at heart, comedic theatre. The shows didn't focus on female nudity until the 20th century.

Today, burlesque venues don't need the same costly licensing as lap-dancing clubs, so promoters tend to call themselves the former even if what they're delivering is closer to the latter. The term has become a handy euphemism for almost naked; last month one of Renault's YouTube ads which featured " burlesque dancers" (or women in underwear) was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, which found that slow-motion shots "of the women's breasts and bottoms", but with their heads obscured, objectified women.

So when I was invited to watch a night of burlesque cabaret at Madame Jojo's in Soho earlier this summer, it was with a feeling of weary resignation; more breasts held captive by tinsel and glitter. The last thing I was expecting was Rubyyy Jones. She walked onto the stage wearing skinny jeans and a leather jacket, her size-16 curves framed by a huge afro of half-brunette and half-peroxide hair; Marilyn Monroe meets Cruella De Vil, and so happy in the limelight I could almost hear her purr.

The premise of her routine is that she's working on her laptop when her boyfriend starts to text. The messages, read out to the audience as a voice-over, become raunchier and raunchier. Suddenly, Goldfrapp's Ooh La La blares out and Rubyyy starts to dance. The next four minutes are a whirl of high-octane activity. One minute she's doing the splits, the next she's throwing herself at the audience with the energy of the Tasmanian devil, intermittently flinging off items of clothing.

It's clear from the outset that the aim is not to titillate but to shock. The first surprise is her body; it isn't the air-brushed kind you see in magazines or advertisements. She has thighs, hips and a belly faintly lined with silver stretch marks. As the routine progresses it also becomes apparent that she doesn't wax or shave her armpit hair. Then it becomes apparent that she doesn't wax or shave anything at all. I realise that in my 30 years on this planet, I have never seen a woman's body like this, except briefly a German NOT exchange's mother, but that's another story. The image has been smoothed, re-touched, waxed and plucked out of existence.

What's more, Rubyyy makes no attempt to play the temptress. She stomps around trying to wriggle out of her skinny jeans (women will know that this is impossible unless you are lying prone on your back in the manner of an upturned beetle), then she falls over trying to get her trousers over her Converse trainers. By the end she stands on stage naked; imperfections proudly on display and the audience — particularly the women — in her thrall.

Rubyyy, whose real name is Rebecca Stewart, is at once a journalist's dream and nightmare; a dream in that she speaks in perfectly formed soundbites, a nightmare in that they're almost all too rude to print. Over lunch she defines her performances as "neo- burlesque " (although some use the term to refer to all modern burlesque — it's a minefield I'm not getting into) and sees it as an entirely different genre to the mainstream showgirls: "Their aim is still to titillate and seduce," she says. "I use the elements of burlesque ; striptease, dance and wit, and I present them how I want to. I don't consider what an audience might want or expect."

If you go to a burlesque show in New York, this is the kind of performance you will expect to see. At around the same time that Von Teese was assembling the jigsaw pieces of the classic showgirl, performers in New York were resurrecting the spirit of burlesque in its original form; bawdy, low-culture and rooted in satire and farce.

The undisputed queen of the scene a is Dirty Martini, or Linda Marraccini, a performer with a degree in modern dance who sells out Carnegie Hall. She also happens to be a UK size 20. In one of her most famous acts she comes on stage as Liberty, dressed in the Stars and Stripes, with scales full of money which she proceeds to devour before twirling around and pulling a 25ft stream of currency out of her rear. She calls this her Patriot Act.

The scene is popular with gay and lesbian audiences and with a lot of women. Often, the performances have a feminist ethos running through them. One of the most renowned stars, Julie Atlas Muz, has a routine in which she appears on stage naked, bound in ropes, and frees herself to the soundtrack of Lesley Gore's You Don't Own Me.

This is not the burlesque that you'll see at most mainstream venues in the UK. I'm told that promoters here prefer to book women who will smile, shimmy and not scare people. One of the dancers says that their attitude tends to be, "if I don't want you in my bed, I don't want you on my stage".

Instead, an alternative scene is emerging, run by the performers themselves. Trixie Malicious and Mat Fraser have started a monthly night called Sleaze in Camden Lock. Fraser was born with shortened arms after his mother was prescribed Thalidomide, and a lot of his routines centre on breaking down taboos surrounding disability. He is married to Atlas Muz, so the show features many of New York's burlesque stars.

Rubyyy also hosts her own revue night once a month, in north London, and she makes a point of featuring as many male performers as female. There are performers intent on pushing boundaries all over the country, from a lesbian burlesque troupe in Manchester to the delightfully named Heidi Bang Tidy, "the Benny Hill of burlesque ", who performs around West Yorkshire.

The only real criteria is that there's a purpose to the routine other than looking pretty; I see performances that satirise the "love affair" a bulimic has with her toilet and the machismo of bankers in the run-up to the financial crisis, several plays on Margaret Thatcher, and one that makes a mockery of the British citizenship test.

The audiences are eclectic, and include a lot of gay men on dates and groups of young women. At one venue, I meet a gang of female art students in their early twenties who tell me they would never set foot in one of the commercial venues which "are tacky and passé". One says she's here "because it is silly and fun but it also makes me think about things like body image and social acceptance — and it feels very gender inclusive."

They may be inclusive but I notice that the acts make most heterosexual men want to run for the hills. On several occasions I dupe male friends into joining me on the premise that there will be naked women, and then watch as their faces fill with fear and confusion. I'd be lying if I said it didn't add something to my enjoyment.

Not all the acts are good and some will, frankly, scar me for life, but having come to the scene as a sceptic, I can see something positive at its heart. For a start, I don't believe that anyone is being exploited — over and over again they tell me that this is about creativity and self-expression.

I ask Rubyyy why she feels the need to take her clothes off at all. Her answer is that after years spent battling bulimia and body dysmorphia as a teenager, she wants to challenge our expectations of what a female body should look like and to encourage women in the audience to re-evaluate how they feel about themselves.

For me, weeks spent watching bodies of all shapes and sizes prancing around brings to mind the criticism Naomi Wolf made in her 1991 book The Beauty Myth: that we rarely see "what other women look like naked; we see only identical humanoid products based loosely on women's bodies". This kind of burlesque goes some way to rectifying that by illustrating all of the things the female body can be besides sexy. I watch women being powerful, funny, vulnerable and grotesque. It's so refreshing to see that, in a whirl of enthusiasm, I volunteer my own chest to the cause.

My first challenge is to come up with a message, ideally one that I can communicate by taking things off. After much chin-stroking, I hit on a theme that resonates with me personally. I am on the scrawny side and have been since childhood. At 30 I have reached a comfortable armistice with my body, but as a teenager I was plagued with the usual insecurities about what a woman's body should look like and painfully aware of the areas where mine fell short; specifically around the hips and chest.

I spent hours watching Baywatch montages of Pamela Anderson running in slow-motion, my fingers crossed for a growth spurt that never came. Instead, I would browse the shelves of the local department store for body-enhancing and contouring lingerie, and so Wonderbras and chicken fillets became my teenage heroin.

The time I spent admiring my newly enhanced silhouette in the mirror was more than equalled by that spent panicking about what I would do if a boy ever got close enough to discover the ruse. When was the right moment to sneak out the chicken fillet? Should I, too, look confused as I take off my Wonderbra and my breasts vanish before his eyes? It left me with a dislike for an industry ON that feeds insecurity; bras that promise you a D cup, knickers that will give you Pippa's bottom, Spanx that deliver the waist of Dita Von Teese.

I tell Rubyyy that I want my routine to parody the fetishising of a body shape that doesn't actually exist and the paraphernalia we're meant to buy to create the illusion that it does (plus the sheer ridiculousness of having to remove it). She approves.

The next step is learning to dance. Fortunately, burlesque moves are relatively simple; you swing bits and you shake bits. Rubyyy is a kind teacher; she even pretends not to notice that, for the first half hour, my hips click as though I'm breaking out of rigor mortis. We choreograph a routine that mainly allows me to stand still and I spend two weeks hard at work on my shimmy.

Then the fun part: shopping. Rubyyy brings along some of her drag queen friends to help. If you've never been shopping with a drag queen, I can't recommend it enough. They are a font of knowledge, veritable Yodas of retail — and they can reach things on the top shelf. I enjoy it so much that I miss the last day of rehearsals because I'm so busy trying on wigs. Realising I haven't had time to sort out the rest of my costume, I then panic-buy everything else in a pound shop.

The venue for the show is a run-down pub in north London, and for one night a month its usual clientele of old soaks is forced out by a bunch of mad women on a quest to take their clothes off. A curtain is drawn down the middle of the bar; on one side it looks like the pub in Only Fools and Horses, on the other, a scene from a Berlin sex club.

Somewhere between 50 and 100 people cram in. I'm reassured to see that they are mainly groups of girls and couples on dates. Occasionally, a man from the other side of the curtain wanders in, drawn by the sight of female flesh, and Rubyyy, who is compering the evening, starts heckling: "Hey you, leery man by the toilet, this show isn't for you." At one point, she throws a shoe at somebody's head. None of which helps calm my terror. A room-full of strangers is about to see me in little more than my birthday suit.

My song is a cover version of Material Girl. At the start of the routine I am wearing a blonde wig and a suit and I'm supposed to be on my way home from work. I get home and after some "long day" acting (digging deep into my grade five speech-and-drama classes) it's time to get comfy. I take the suit off to reveal a short dress. I shimmy to the front of the stage and remove the wig (this doesn't go as smoothly as anticipated, due to some stubborn hair clips) and fling it to the audience. Then the dress comes off to reveal bounteous curves — or at least a bra and pants that give the impression of them.

I do my best parody of someone who really, really loves their curves and then adopt a face that is supposed to indicate that I might have been telling a fib. Out of my bra come a few pieces of loo roll, then some cotton wool, then chunks of sponge and the glitter. I give my best "oops, where have my boobs gone?" face, remove some loo roll from my bra and d**** it across my shoulders as if it were a feather boa.

Eventually I turn away to undo my bra — tricky under pressure, as I'm sure many men will agree — and throw it off before wheeling around to face the audience to reveal the words "BIG" on my left breast and "DEAL" on my right. They have been custom-made to safeguard my modesty - and what's more, they sparkle. There is an almighty roar from the audience and a great deal of foot-stamping.

I'm so flooded with relief at having finished that it takes a couple of days before I can sit back and process it all. Looking back, I don't think I have ever felt less concerned by stretch marks, sagging bits or even the odd protruding bone. I was not standing on that stage asking anybody to approve of my body, I was asking them to laugh at my joke — and they did.

I recognise that taking your clothes off in a hypersexualised society is an unusual form of protest. But when the point you're making is that none of us look the way we're constantly told we ought to, then being naked is the most effective way of doing it. Standing on that stage with just a pun across my chest wasn't just a liberating experience, it was — brace yourself for the cliché — empowering THE AIM IS NOT

TO TITILLATE

BUT SHOCK

I WORK FOR

TWO WEEKS ON

MY SHIMMY

Edition: 01
Section: Features
Page: 40,41,42,43,44,45
Record Number: 76429096
(c) Times Newspapers Limited 2013

[brunettesrule]

Originally Posted by atmccloud

Reporter Rosie Kinchen tries out burlesque

[url]
According to Private Eye magazine, she felt she was bullied into this and has complained to her employer's human resources department. So I guess she's embarassed...

I can't find any articles by Private Eye magazine, or Tweets by Rosie Kinchen complaining about being forced to do the burlesque article. Where did you hear about that?

[Cosmo1963]

Street of Shame column in Private Eye reports it.

[atmccloud]

Originally Posted by Cosmo1963

Street of Shame column in Private Eye reports it.

Exactly. Unfortunately the publication in question is only available in dead-tree format and I've lost my copy. It wasn't a long article.