Reluctant provocateurs

Burlesque was born in the mid-1800s as a send-up of contemporary plays, songs, and manners. As an art form dominated by women, it delighted the lowest of the low by parodying upper-class society, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comforted. Almost a century before its Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunctions, burlesque was in the hands of all-time tease queen Gypsy Rose Lee. But somewhere between the notorious prudery of the ’50s and the unbridled openness of the ’60s, burlesque got a little lost.

Sharon MacDonald, founder of Toronto’s Skin Tight Outta Sight burlesque troupe, blames its fall on the “porn explosion”-things like table dancing, television, massage parlours, and readily available porn that goes way beyond the strip or the tease. With the one-handed fast-forward of home theatre pornography, people realized they could just edit the dialogue right out. There was no room for the tease in the goal-oriented atmosphere of the bachelor’s bedroom.

“They just wanted the meat, not the potatoes,” MacDonald says. “But burlesque is more about a story, a costume, and a girl.”

Burlesque started its slow comeback in spite of this lust for lazy sexual convenience. Musicals like Chicago and Moulin Rouge did their part to put it back in the mainstream, as did the likes of Madonna and Christina Aguilera. But before they had even worked out their costume budgets, the underground was burgeoning with a new burlesque, plotting its insurgency and getting ready for a resurrection.

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Skin Tight Outta Sight’s Sharon MacDonald bills her alter-ego, Tanya Cheex, as a “glamazon”: a larger-than-life cartoon version of her real self, harking back to the ’50s bombshell archetypes like Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. MacDonald’s born-again version of burlesque-some call it neo, she calls it revisionist-can’t help but be a little bit political.

Skin Tight makes big women beautiful with a salute to most things Russ Meyer and a couple things Gloria Steinem. Six-foot-plus in heels and voluptuous, MacDonald sees herself “as a living cartoon, in a good way.” She explains, “Most women don’t look like those women in the magazines, so it’s all about being able to say ‘this is sexy too,’ without making a political statement for women who are, like, bigger. I’m not going to be the leader of the fat parade. That’s not what I’m about.”

MacDonald-who also co-founded the Toronto Burlesque and Vaudeville Alliance, which now boasts almost 400 international members-insists that bringing back the tease is always job one.

“It’s the art, the story, the look, the wink, the costume, and it’s the girl,” says MacDonald. “We consider ourselves burlesque revisionists because we use a lot of traditional acts,” says MacDonald. “But we like to screw around with female archetypes that were around in the ’40s and ’50s-the frustrated housewife or the frustrated girlfriend; the school mistress or the naughty schoolgirl; the bombshell.”

MacDonald likes to put a spin on these stereotypes, using traditional bump-and-grind music in one number, then Iron Maiden and Flipper in the next. While she still insists that their motives are ” not too political,” some of the stuff does have sting to it, such as Skin Tight’s recent Biblical Burlesque revue, which, depending where they do it, is sometimes perceived as just a little bit blasphemous. “We’re not going to stick to the typical fan dances,” she warns.

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Neither are we, says Cabaret Vulgare. They portray a frustrated housewife named Mrs. Jones as a sort of everywoman, perched on a toilet and fantasizing about getting it on with a cross-dresser while Mr. Jones waxes fussbudget in the mirror.

“It’s political in that it’s never stated whether Mrs. Jones knows it’s a man or woman, so it could be both,” says Troy Yorke, founder and performer at Cabaret Vulgare. “It goes beyond gender.”

Yorke says Vulgare takes the comedy of burlesque and “pushes it into a dangerous territory.” Vulgare plays with taboo by making the audience laugh at the things they normally abhor. Hopefully, says Yorke, “the gag leaves them saying, ‘I’m laughing… I shouldn’t be, but it’s hilarious.'”

“It’s about skeletons people prefer to keep in the closet,” continues Yorke, “whether it’s social, personal, or something entirely else. It’s also a matter of bringing up onto the stage the things that we don’t want to look at or talk about and making it all right to laugh at them.”

Cabaret Vulgare has been playing monthly for three years at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times in front of twentysomethings all the way up to ninetysomethings, an audience that York says has included straights, gays, vanilla couples from the suburbs, punks, and fetishists. What do these people from disparate demographics have in common? Yorke says it’s simple: they’re all willing to tease their darker selves.

Yorke promises future incarnations of his revue will have more of a carnival atmosphere as Vulgare itself morphs into something like “burlesque on acid.”

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For Vancouver’s Fluffgirls, “schooling the ignorant” is as important as “bringing the art of striptease back.” Touching upon current world issues “with a bit of humor and ass-oops, that’s ‘sass,'” the Fluffgirls aren’t afraid, for example, to take Republicans straight on, then play with them. That’s called a slap-and-tickle, says Fluffgirl Indra, who sees old-school tease queens as empowered.

“Gypsy Rose Lee would walk on stage, strip, talk, do whatever she wanted,” says Indra. “She wrote her own material, so how can that not be empowering? She was a great performer because she was a performer. She made a lot of money, saved a lot of money, she wrote a couple great books. It gave her a great venue to be the woman she wanted to be. No one told her what to do-ever.”

And burlesque has never been so political as it is now, even if the agendas do clash from group to group, city to city. Indra, for instance, while on a U.S. tour, is working on a skit called Why Only Republican Guys Want to Date Me. The punchline is that she’s a Green Party member with a soft spot for five-star bistros as well as forest preservation.

For Fluffgirl founder Cecilia Bravo, revealing the lighter side of hypocrisy can be a good thing. Depending on the gig, Fluffgirls are prone to go the political route. Says Bravo, “the basic stuff can get kind of boring, so we add a little more of the political here and there.” Fluffgirl Chica, for instance, who is Mexican, does a riff about getting caught up with the U.S. Border patrol. And George W. Bush was a central mark on the Fluffgirls’ World Domination Tour.

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In the more commercial world of LA and TV, there are representatives like the well-known and often-downloaded Suicide Girls, and American pin-up girl Dita Von Teese. Founder Missy Suicide calls the stuff on her website “punk burlesque,” saying her troupe employs a “Do-it-yourself punk rock aesthetic.”

“The girls use their performance as a way to express themselves, and they definitely interject their personalities into their performances which range from a take on The Graduate to a hula-hoop performance like nothing you have ever seen.” There is debate about whether Suicide Girls is really political or just posturing. It looks like punk rock, but is it all that seditious?

Dita Von Teese would insist it’s not-but wethinks she might protest too much. Decidedly postcard-pretty and seriously enhanced, Von Teese insists that ladies are not to discuss politics. But as apolitical as Von Teese claims to be, she’s assertive and entrepreneurial; she keeps right-of-refusal on magazine cover shoots as well as ownership of all her slides, and she’s married to the (also suspiciously apolitical) Marylin Manson, who pretends that it’s all art for art’s sake, but then sits down on tape with Michael Moore.

“I like what Dita does, but then I’m not as political as someone like Coco La Crème, who has very strong opinions on things such as feminism and gender roles,” says Sharon MacDonald. “I do like some of the old values in a modern way. But I find what Dita does would be too limiting for my troupe.”

Von Teese and the Suicide Girls, for example, hold fast to the mainstream ideas about beauty that they’ve borrowed from Hollywood and Cosmopolitan. But MacDonald’s troupe features “girls that are rounder… a variety that you wouldn’t normally get in a strip club or Playboy.”

Still, MacDonald repeats the line (that’s starting to sound like a refrain) that it’s not all about politics. “When I hear people say, ‘You’re so brave to get up there and do that,’ I wear it like a back-handed compliment. It’s like, ‘No, I’m not brave, I’m just doing what I enjoy. I’m not thinking about it too hard.”

“We don’t want to shove anything down your throats,” says MacDonald. That’s good news if you’re going to a burlesque show strictly for the tassels and choreography. As so many of burlesque’s spokespeople will attest, the art form is still about the art, and will always be a spectacle, a work of artful entertainment, and an act of beauty before it is anything else. But beware: you might learn something while you’re busy trying to stifle your erection. At the heart of the show, MacDonald admits, “we consider ourselves theatrical provocateurs.”