Dance Yourself Happy!

In Chippenham, Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend

This week I taught a burlesque workshop for the Sahara Sisters in Chippenham. They are a lovely group of women and threw themselves into the workshop with their customary gusto!  Once everyone had got dressed up in feather boas, gloves, high heels, wigs and plenty of bling, we ran through our showgirl walks and seductive glove removal and worked on a choreography to that Marilyn Monroe classic, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend.  I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.  Unfortunately, I do have a tendency to discard my gloves rather too enthusiastically, flinging them with such vigour that I generally can't find them afterwards.  This time I surpassed myself, lobbing my glove overhead and finding it had actually stuck to the wall!  Most curious...

The Case for Burlesque

Now I realise that Burlesque is an emotive word as far as some belly dancers are concerned.  (But then again, 'belly dance' also makes some dancers' hackles rise...)  I can see their point; those of us who have been dancing for a while have fought so hard to improve the reputation of this dance and see it recognised as a valid dance form like flamenco, jazz or salsa, that we don't want to jeopardise the progress that has been made.

And it hasn't been easy. I still shudder at the memory of a gig I once did in a restaurant in Reading.  I was there with a couple of friends and we just wanted to get some experience of dancing in public. I should have known it would be a disaster when I first clapped eyes on the restaurant  - a  dingy, delapidated building that backed on to a graveyard.

Unbeknownst to my fellow dancers and myself, the place had been booked out by a group of bikers.  Apart from the fact that by the time we arrived the women were already throwing up in the loos and were extremely aggressive towards us in the mistaken belief that we were there to get off with their men (now, that really is deluded), those men's comments nearly put me off dancing for life.

'Ee, you're better than strippers!' and 'If we paid you more, would you take your top off?' were among the tamer remarks.

As a feminist and someone who held a responsible publishing job at the time and was used to being taken seriously at work, I was mortified to be treated like a piece of meat.  True, once we got talking to the bikers they were perfectly OK, but it really put me off cabaret for a long, long  time.

And that's just one story. I have heard so many dancers relay similar experiences, often far worse.  So why am I now so staunchly pro-Burlesque, which in many people's eyes is just glorified stripping?

A Burlesque Fest at Madame Jojo's

On Sunday I intended to go to the MADN AGM (Mosaic Arabic Dance Network) and workshops with Horatio and Beata.  I had booked my tickets and planned my route to Spalding, (relatively) undaunted by the five-hour round trip.  However, on Sunday morning it didn't seem such a good idea after all.  Having spent a good four hours in the car on the Saturday, I just couldn't face another stint - especially on such a gloriously sunny day.  After all, who knows when the sun might come out again?

A sensible person would have pottered around the garden, soaking up the sun and taking life easy.  Sadly, I have never had much sense and I have yet to master the art of doing nothing.  My mind believes that a day exists to be filled, however much my body begs to be given a break.  So it was inevitable that I should trawl on the internet for things to do.

And when I stumbled upon the ShimmyShake website promoting 'London's Belly Dance and Burlesque Show' - check it out for yourself at www.shimmyshakeshow.com - I took it as a divine sign that I had found the perfect way for me to spend my Sunday...

Review to follow shortly!

Burlesque Fest!

Sequinned nipple tassles, oversized feather fans and frilly knickers can mean only one thing - the ultra-glamorous, highly camp and achingly chic world of burlesque. A number of dancing friends are obsessed by it but apart from seeing a few performances, it's not something I know much about.  However, having spent a week attending a workshop, a performance and a documentary screening on the subject, I've learned quite a bit more.

Firstly I attended a workshop with Venus Noir, Bristol's doyenne of burlesque, at the Space in Stroud last Saturday. I had seen Venus perform at Hub in the Subs, a cabaret evening in Stroud and was impressed by her sophistication, elegance and forties-style glamour.  The women-only workshop was great.  Venus was down-to-earth, approachable and generous. 

After learning a sequence with a parasol the sixteen of us had to perform it one by one on the stage.  It was nerve-racking but certainly got us to polish up on our performance skills.  During the course of the workshop we learned to remove gloves and stockings, tantalise with floorwork - and even twirl nipple tassles if you wanted to. (Not really an option for me.)  Everybody came away enthusing about the class. 

What the workshop really brought home to me was the fact that burlesque is playful, cheeky and sometimes humorous.  Contrary to popular belief, it's not about stripping but rather about teasing your audience and celebrating the female form. Which explains why 70% or more of burlesque audiences are women.

On Tuesday I attended an evening of burlesque at the Koko Club, Camden with Gwen and Harriet - both burlesque aficionados.  (The last time I went there it was the Camden Palais, which really shows my age.)  I knew I was heading in the right direction when I saw gaggles of women in hobble skirts, hats and veils and vertiginous heels queuing outside - it was worth the entrance price just to watch the audience.

The evening was headlined by Immodesty Blaise and compered by Julian Clary. It was fabulous.  Immodesty's sets were spectacular - the first had a giant bakelite phone centre stage and the second a huge gilded rocking horse - and her costumes to die for.  She also is incredibly charismatic.  But one of my favourite performers was Dirty Martini, from the US. A larger-than-life, size 20 cross between Mae West and Marilyn, she was irresistably camp. I particularly enjoyed her recreation of a piece that apparently scandalized US audiences in the 40s, where she pretened to be caught in a giant glittery spider's web while a black gloved 'spider' scurried across her body.  Definitely a night to remember.

The following day I attended the premiere of a documentary on Princess Farhana of Hollywood, a burlesque and belly dancer who has run a number of workshops in the UK.  Having kept the two aspects of her work quite separate for a number of years, she's now 'come out' to the belly dance community about her burlesque work and embraces them both.

Not everyone is convinced that burlesque is more than just stripping, and many dancers are anxious to keep it quite distinct from belly dance.  As one highly-respected  belly dancer, who has been involved in the dance scene for over 30 years, pointed out, she had spent most of her career trying to improve the public's perception of the dance and convince people that it was an art form and NOT stripping.  She felt that this current flirtation with burlesque was undoing a lot of the good work that she and others had done.

Personally, I think it depends on the skill of the performer and the context of the dance.  I would tend to keep belly dance and burlesque quite separate - I wouldn't do burlesque to Arabic music, for example - but I don't think there's anything wrong with either.  There is no way that I would ever choose to strip down to nipple tassles and pasties, but I do think burlesque teaches you performance skills that can be invaluable in belly dance.  And you don't have to remove much; one of the sexiest performances at the workshop was someone taking five minutes to remove a pair of gloves.