Yesterday evening I went to a show called the Starshine Burlesque, given in the backroom of a bar in the bohemian East Village. It was inexpensive, unpretentious fun. I felt in the mood to see women taking off their clothes off in an entertainment context, but I didn’t want to spend a hundred bucks for beers and lapdances at my usual haunts; so I decided to check out the Starshine. It just cost me five for a beer, five for the admission, and a couple bucks thrown in a hat passed for tips.
I don’t really consider the neo-burlesque shows that I’ve seen over the last three or four years to be stripping in the usual sense of girls disrobing to earn a living by turning guys on. Although the neo-burlycue babes do shed their costumes and dance around in pasties and g-strings, what they do is often more like vaudeville or performance art on themes and motifs borrowed from pinups and old-time striptease. The dancers in the show last night each did a single song, interpreting the lyrics by taking off their appropriately chosen costumes or outfits. Each number, which lasted about five minutes, was done with a theatrical or comical emphasis rather than for the sake of being overtly seductive, but it was still nice to see gals onstage lifting up their skirts and revealing the tops of their stockings...
As the hundreds of entries to this blog make clear, I enjoy watching women take off their clothes as an entertainment spectacle. The one thing that neo-burlesque has that stripclubs (at least in Manhattan) do not is that the neo-naughties can strip out of whatever they want. In stripclubs they usually wear gowns or short dresses, and remove them post-haste with little tease; but in last night’s Starshine show, Scarlet Sinclair peeled out of a 50s-style flower print shirtwaist dress; Honi Harlow shed a Raggedy Ann outfit; Peekaboo Pointe doffed a 1960s ladies’ suit, slinky slip and stockings; Creamy Stevens danced out of a red-and-white patterned dress (and she wore the best shoes of the evening, very high black ankle-strap platforms ala Bettie Page); and Little Brooklyn emerged from a metallic-colored outfit that recalled the disco excesses of the 80s. Stevens and Brooklyn co-produce the show.
Even though the program did not emphasize the prurient, it was still sexy, especially when the dancers reached around to open their bras--displaying their backs to the audience, undoing the bra hooks, pulling down the cups, and then turning around to reveal breasts with pasties. My fascination with this particular disrobing gesture might be a legacy of growing up in the 60s, when that move was usually the high point of sophisticated love or sex scenes in films.
Many of the women in neo-burlesque, like the performers in the show I saw last night, often have very attractive faces which are enhanced by dramatic makeup; but their bodies are those of average women, rather than showbiz types. Sometimes their hips are broad, and their breasts are of normal proportions. They are a realistic contrast to the idealized creatures we are accustomed to seeing in today's overly plastic entertainment.
Sometimes their bodies recall the figures of many burlesque dancers in the 30s through the 50s, whose shapes also ran the gamut of types. The old-time striptease world always allowed for variety in female forms, a variety that neo-burlesque emulates.
Anyway, all these analytical thoughts weren’t going through my head during the actual show, which was light-hearted and brisk. It lasted around an hour, which was about right, and also included a guy named Ukelele Louie in crazy clown makeup doing a very funny song imagining his own funeral as a bizarrely festive affair with an unusual buffet...consisting of his own body. Thankfully, his song's emphasis was on comedy, not cannibalism. Emcee Carmen Mofongo, who bills herself as "the spirit of Carmen Miranda in a Nuyorican from the Bronx" did the emcee chores with humorous aplomb and even used a riding crop to spank a few audience volunteers onstage. There was also a cute drinking contest wherein two female volunteers, kneeling in front of the statuesque team of Creamy Stevens and Little Brooklyn, raced to finish bottles of beer held between the dancers’ legs. The moment when Stevens and Brooklyn squeezed those bottles between their creamy thighs was indeed a shining one...
Yes, I left the Starshine Burlesque in a good mood, and since they have different acts every week, I’ll be sure to check them out again sometime. If you want more information, I’ve included a link below to their website.
StarshineBurlesque
