There's one sure way to stand out on stage: bare some flesh. Maddy Costa reports
Every night after the curtain goes up at London's Piccadilly Theatre,
something peculiar happens. A woman on a trapeze swings in and out of
view, and each time she flashes across the stage, she laughs
deliriously and discards another piece of clothing. It is not, as Tom
Stoppard must have known when he slotted this scene into his play
Jumpers, a sight you would expect to see in a smart West End theatre.
Little has changed in the three decades since Jumpers was first
produced. Striptease, for all its theatricality, has never exactly been
embraced by theatre. The closest the two have ever come to forming a
relationship was in burlesque: the naughty acts that started life in
mid-19th-century British music halls with cheeky female performers
flashing well-turned ankles, then travelled to the US, where they got
more artful and explicit with every passing decade. And it's to
burlesque that a new generation of performers and producers are now
turning, with the aim of reclaiming striptease for high art and mass
entertainment. That's
the impetus behind C'est Barbican, a Christmas show by London
club/performance-art promoters Duckie. The show started life last year
as C'est Vauxhall in a shabby pub in south London, where it was a
surprise sell-out hit. This year it is transferring to London's
Barbican. Not bad for a kitsch cabaret that melds the low-rent
pleasures of a lap-dancing club with the absurd glamour of the Moulin
Rouge.
This being burlesque - which still, in Britain,
primarily means satire - you won't see any nakedness in Duckie's show.
There is an illusion of nudity, with all the performers wearing
traditional flesh-toned body stockings, and a promise of sleaze: among
the entertainments that audiences, divided into tables, can order for
their personal delectation are a shocking-sounding act called Miss High
Leg Kick Does Seven Cocks and the enticing Emotional Striptease. But,
says producer Simon Casson, the show is really about "revealing the
real person underneath the artifice. The forms it uses might be
gurning, tits'n'teeth, but it's more sophisticated than that: it works
on different levels, takes you on a journey."
Duckie arrives at
the Barbican just as burlesque is becoming more fashionable than it has
been in decades. Partly responsible for this is Club Whoopee, a new
monthly extravaganza that updates late-19th-century burlesque. Its
first Christmas show is inspired by the Russian winter: acts include
risque ballet from Russian ballerina Rosaleen Young and resident
stripper Miss Immodesty Blaize as Venus in Furs.
Club Whoopee
is run by Lara Clifton and Tamara Tyrer, who met last year during a
fan-dancing course at the International Workshop festival. Set up 15
years ago to provide fairly esoteric training for actors, the festival
was transformed in 2002 by its new artistic director, Luke Dixon, who
decided to make it the home of all things burlesque, vaudeville and
cabaret. Now workshops offer instruction in the art of being a
showgirl, drag for women, corset-making and stripping. "A lot of
cabaret clubs have emerged in the past year," says Dixon, "but there's
nowhere for people to learn new acts or try out new ideas. It's our job
to embrace every aspect of performance: here, strippers can do acting
workshops, and mainstream actors can try a more marginal activity like
fan-dancing."
Most of all, Dixon is concerned with finding ways
of bringing the skills of variety entertainments into the 21st century
- a feeling shared by all British burlesque aficionados. "Burlesque
clubs in the US just try to imitate 1950s models," says Clifton. "The
acts we attract are more bawdy than that, more intelligent and
challenging." Performances by Miss Immodesty Blaize and Walter, a
fiftysomething man who sings coarse music-hall ditties while stripping
out of a corset, look old-fashioned but "are also very modern in terms
of their energy and sexual dominance".
The same is true of
Lucifire, one of four special guests at C'est Barbican: her individual
brand of "grotesque burlesque" is a powerful amalgamation of 1940s
fashion, striptease, pyrotechnics and circus-of-horrors skills. At her
most coquettish, she sings Marilyn Monroe numbers before stripping to
sequined nipple pasties and an elegant g-string; at her most alarming,
Lucifire shoots fireworks from her chest and crotch.
This sort
of modernisation, says Casson, is crucial. "I love the whole vaudeville
history, but you have to take it somewhere. This isn't the heritage
industry." He ceaselessly pushes Duckie's artists to develop "short
visual performances that are like epic novels, or a Robert Altman
film". At the same time, he is nostalgic for "the kind of places Mum
and Dad used to go: the Irish club down the road, where you could put
on your best outfit and have a good night out". Not for nothing is
Duckie described on flyers as "purveyors of progressive working-class
entertainment": its work seeks to be populist and avant-garde in equal
measure.
Clifton and Tyrer aspire to something very similar: a
mix of "high theatre and the lowest humour, that is entertaining and
artistic without being self-indulgent". Their club is a place where
audiences are invited to dress up: people arrived at a recent nautical
evening in sailor suits and elaborate home-made mermaid outfits, while
the dress code for the Christmas show includes "Rasputin meets the Snow
Queen, Russian Dolls, Dr Zhivagos, Nanooks of the North". In a sense,
audiences become part of the show - and that, says Dixon, is precisely
the appeal of the new incarnation of burlesque. "People love glamour,
and they love the idea that the glamour on stage rubs off on them.
There is a rapport between the stage and the audience: people are part
of the experience."
For some people, of course, that experience
essentially boils down to a chance to see attractive, near-naked women.
Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican, jokes that he was
attracted to Duckie's show because, "I like smutty cabaret", before
offering a more considered account of its appeal. Duckie is aware of
the contradictions: Marisa Carnesky, one of the original C'est Vauxhall
performers, describes the group's surprise when a show that was
supposed to be a humorous subversion of mindless corporate
entertainment itself became "a trendy office party: a version of
corporate entertainment".
Tyrer hopes that Club Whoopee will
continue to expand, but is worried about the implications of that
increased popularity. "We want it to keep its intimacy and artistic
nature. We don't want something voyeuristic; we don't want it to become
cheap." Her collaborator, though, disagrees passionately. "There's
nothing wrong with voyeurism," Clifton argues. "I used to be a stripper
myself and learned to really enjoy the act. People think they're not
allowed to look in that way, but when done well, stripping can be a
wonderful thing."
In the end, it all comes down to what
Carnesky identifies as an age-old division in western culture: "Art
traditionally aspires to spiritual enlightenment; entertainment is more
for the loins. Sex is what divides them." C'est Barbican is sneaky in
that it promises sex - then withholds nudity and confronts its audience
with a smart yet light-hearted comment on their own expectations
instead. When it comes to new burlesque, you never know what you're
going to get: and that's why it's so much fun.
Caption: The shape of things to
come: C'est Barbican, which transformed the Barbican's Pit into a seedy
cabaret and picked up an Olivier award for it.
