Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Burlesque Performers

Listed below are some of our favourite burlesque dancers.

Dita Von Teese

The first lady of Burlesque. The scene's most famous star. 

Immodesty Blaize, UK 

 Immodesty Blaize - the Uk's most famous burlesque star.

 

Miss Polly Rae, UK

Miss Polly Rae is one of Britains top burlesque dancers. She can be found performing around the UK with her Hurly Burly Girlys, London's leading troupe of singers, teasers and bump and grinders. 

Angie Pontani , US 

 Angie Pontani is one of America's hottest and sassiest burlesque stars. Angie was recently crowned "The Reigning Queen of Burlesque, Miss Exotic World 2008".

Kitten De Ville, USA

 A former winner of Miss Exotic World, Kitten is a fast rising star in the world of burlesque.
Kitten's signature look is her platinum blond Marilyn Monroe-esque locks.
Her fantastic shimmy has earnt her the title "Queen of the Shake".

Roxi Dlite , Canada

 Roxi Dlite is Canada's most popular burlesque star.

Masuimi Max

 Burlesque dancer, fetish model and pin up girl, Masuimi Max is of Korean and german descent and is hot, hot hot! 

Ivy Paige, UK

Ivy's club night, ‘Scandalous’, takes place once a
month in London at Volupté.
When she's not performing she teaches burlesque and cabaret workshops to women who don’t necessarily want to be performers but who want to boost their self-esteem, whatever their shape and size. 

Vicky Butterfly, UK

Classic burlesque with a modern twist. A trained costumier Vicky's clothes are elaborate and beautiful. Influences include Rita Hayworth and Lousie Brooks.

Lola Bel Aire, USA

 
 Burlesque dancer and pin-up girl Lola Bel Aire is a rising star on the American scene. Lola can be regularly found shaking her tush at Lili’s Burlesque Revue in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Michelle L'Amour. USA 

  Michelle "Toots" L'amour, comes from Chicago. She was Miss Exotic World 2005. She hit the big time this year when she prefromed a sexy Knight Rider inspired burlesque routine in front of  Simon Cowlell, David.

Grotesque Burlesque Performers

Grotesque burlesque is a more extreme version of burlesque. It's a modern twisted take on the traditional striptease act, fusing cabaret and nudity with elements of horror, S&M and black comedy. Expect strap ons and fake blood. 

Below are a few of its performers.

Clea Cutthroat, Berlin 
 Clea uses blood, latex, hot wax and bondage. 

Empress Stah, UK
A star of the alternative scene. Stah has performed at Torture Garden, Skin Two and Erotica.

Julie Atlas Muz, New York 

Host of America's Favorite Burlesque Gameshow This or That! on public access, Julie's live shows are for the hardcore - involving cupcakes gang rape and vomit.


Monday, November 1, 2010

ET's Exclusive: Behind The Scenes of Burlesque

Trailer Watch: Burlesque Stars Cher, Tucci, Aguilera

Never underestimate Screen Gems topper Clint Culpepper. More than most studio execs, he gets to put together an eclectic range of projects under Sony’s low-budget Screen Gems label because he’s got that magic gut instinct for what audiences want and how to sell it to them. Since 1999, Culpepper has figured out which pictures to make without stepping on the toes of big Columbia and little Sony Pictures Classics: horror, urban and teen flicks like the Underworld, Hostel and Resident Evil franchises and Dear John.
One of Culpepper’s pet projects for a while now has been the Steve Antin musical Burlesque (due Thanksgiving) which stars Cher in a welcome return to the screen as the impresario of a struggling burlesque club. Christina Aguilera makes her screen debut; Stanley Tucci, Kristen Bell and Julianne Hough co-star. E.T.‘s first look and a new trailer are on the jump. (Farewell to departing E.T. vet Mary Hart, whose sizable salary got the budget axe this week.) 

Charm of burlesque stars endures decades later

Burlesque queens of yore, clockwise from top left: Marna Broadhurst, Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr, Dixie Evans, St. Cyr, Tempest Storm, Lily Rose and Sally Rand. Center: Storm. 


A thousand patrons — some having paid as much as 40 cents for a front-row seat — would be shouting. The pit orchestra would be playing, brassy and loud.
Listen carefully, and you can almost hear it still.
Yes, the Empire is fallen, gone for more than half-a-century, turned into another Washington Street parking lot. The ancient baggy-pants comics and their even more ancient jokes have faded away. Most of the dancers retired decades ago.
And yet this sexy yet strangely innocent entertainment still lives — and even thrives.
Ironic "Neo-Burlesque" shows play trendy theaters, featuring a new generation of performers. An upcoming feature film, "Burlesque," dramatizes the art with born-for-the-part divas Cher and Christina Aguilera.
Books like "Burlesque: A Living History," a multitude of websites and nonprofit social organizations like the Golden Days of Burlesque Historical Society allow veteran entertainers to keep in touch with each other, and their fans.
And an affectionate documentary, "Behind the Burly Q," opening today in Manhattan, captures it all, including those years when, outlawed in New York, the art took off in Jersey, providing, as director Leslie Zemeckis says, "a big show for very little money."
Wrapped in glamour
"Everybody thinks, oh burlesque, it’s just stripping," says Zemeckis. "But there was a chorus line, there were novelty acts, there were singers — in its heyday, it was a big show for very little money. Of course, there were the strippers, too. That was the attraction — ‘You’re gonna see stuff!’ But you really didn’t see that much."
The real raunch? That came later, towards the end of the ‘60s — the bottomless bars, the brass poles, the twenties tucked into G-strings. It wasn’t real dancing anymore, and the real dancers got out. But for a time there was a kind of glamour to the art, or at least a working-class idea of glamour — sequins, feathers, marabou.
And for years a lot of it was in Jersey theaters — the Empire and the Adams in Newark, the Hudson in Union City, the Globe in Atlantic City.
"When Mayor LaGuardia closed the burlesque theaters in New York (in 1937), the casts and crews just crossed the river," explained in an e-mail Jane Briggeman, author of several histories and founder of the Golden Days of Burlesque Historical Society. "When the society first started, I had a whole group who came from New Jersey."
Their fans crossed the Hudson too. New York might still have the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Great White Way, but only New Jersey had "Peaches, the Incomparable Queen of Rhythm" or those "laffy daffy fun stars, Bob Ferguson & Max Coleman."
"The New Yorkers had to come to Jersey," said Nat Bodian, a Newark historian and veteran journalist who remembers going on the free passes that once papered newsrooms. "The tube practically brought them right to the Empire. . . . And when someone like Georgia Sothern came — the greatest stripper who ever lived — they filled the place."
Accident Became Act
By that time burlesque itself was already old, with roots in the cuckold farces of commedia dell’arte. According to legend, striptease was added in 1917 when a dancer at one of Minsky’s New York theaters started removing her costume before leaving the stage. The audience went wild, the accident became an act and modern burlesque was born.
It was still, though, more than stripping. In fact, remembered dancer Bambi Jones, 80, "you were never characterized as a stripper. You were a ‘character dancer,’ ‘exotic dancer,’ ‘interpretive dancer’— never stripper."
The striptease acts — or simply "strips" — were only part of the show, too. Sometimes there would be "a specialty" — for a while, Daisy and Violet Hilton, the conjoined twins of "Freaks," traveled the circuit. And there were the singers and comics, many of whom — Robert Alda, Phil Silvers, Lou Costello — went on to bigger careers.
"My dad started out as a ‘dancing juvenile,’" said Chris Costello. "He was supposed to warm up the audience before the top bananas, but he was so funny no one wanted to follow him! That’s where he met my mom, in the Ann Corio show. He was smitten — he’d just stand in the wings watching her in the chorus. Ann told her, ‘You know, you should go out with Lou, he really likes you.’ And my mom said, ‘Go out with a burlesque comic? If I want to starve, I can starve on my own!’"
She married the Paterson boy, though — and he teamed up with Asbury Park straight man Bud Abbott, and went on to Hollywood. Most performers, though stayed on tour, doing a week in Newark before moving on. Those who could afford it stopped first in Weehawken, where designers Rex Huntington and Robert Lockwood specialized in peel-away costumes. The rest stitched their rhinestones on the bus.
It wasn’t an easy life, and although a star like Corio, Gypsy Rose Lee or Lili St. Cyr could make thousands of dollars a week, for most it was just a way to feed themselves, or their children. Some were still children themselves (Sothern lied about her age, and started at 13). Others were fleeing abuse. Expenses were high and, for minority entertainers, engagements were often segregated.
"No one I talked to felt exploited, but nobody ever talked ‘empowering,’ either," Zemeckis said. "Most got into this because it was the only thing they could do."
Yet many look back on that life fondly. Sigrid R. Spangenberg, 68, was a young mother when a sexy sunbathing snapshot ran in the Milwaukee Journal; within a week, she had an offer from a burlesque troupe. Only after discussing it with her family did she sign on, doing a Dietrich-influenced act as "Lilli Marlene."
"Men thought we were easy, but the truth is that all of us either had boyfriends or husbands waiting," she replied in an e-mail. "The greatest satisfaction of being in burlesque came with payday."
Entertaining rules
The old burlesque world was its own world. There was the lingo (the small girl at the end of the chorus line was the "pony"; a dancer who could handle lines was a "talking woman"). There were the rules, which varied by city ("Pants not below four fingers from your navel," Jones remembered. "No touching yourself anywhere.")
And there was — even in a backstage full of cigar smoke and unwashed laundry — a real professionalism.
Stage names would be chosen ("Candy Cotton," "Chili Pepper," "Jade Green, the Jewish Lollipop"). Elaborate acts would be devised, with trained birds or giant champagne glasses. (For a while, Jones carried a football and billed herself as "Joi Naymith.") One dancer almost started a fire when one of her flaming tassels flew into the audience.
And yet, "Burlesque was family entertainment," Hudson dancer Joan Torino insisted in Briggeman’s "Burlesque: A Living History." "Fellows brought their gals to see stars, and to still have a little naughty fun." After a Newark show, couples would get highballs at the Empire Bar or black-and-white sodas at Emma’s Luncheonette.
But then in the ’50s, to boost profits, producers began firing the variety acts and loading the shows with more "strips" — a change which gave censors an excuse for raids. Dancers were arrested en masse. New ordinances were passed. Theaters were shuttered (the Empire and the Hudson both closed for good in 1957).
Eventually burlesque came back in clubs, but the tone had changed. Now, owners expected dancers to hustle drinks. New, X-rated tastes left nothing to the imagination.
"The decline of burlesque was due to the new wave of pole-dancers, and go-gos in the nude, and open porn," e-mailed Spangenberg, who quit in 1973. "It became boring and obsolete."
"You went from gowns to pasties to nothing, from a full orchestra to a three-piece band to a tape," Zemeckis said. "Blaze Starr talks about doing her act, and they’re projecting hard-core porn on the wall. Who could compete with that? Who would want to?"
And so the dancers exited, stage left. Some went into "respectable" endeavors. Some went into politics. ("Hope Diamond, Gem of the Exotics" eventually re-emerged as Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini.) Some are still grinding away. (Jones just did a layout for Garage magazine.) Many more have died.
But those who remain have their memories, bright and shiny as a rhinestone. And a certain indefinable, indelible shimmy.
"In the early ’90s we were doing an Abbott and Costello tribute and they brought in Ann Corio," said Costello. "Well, they introduced her, they started playing ‘The Stripper’ — and she stood up and started peeling off the opera gloves again. I tell you, no one could take their eyes off her — in her ‘80s and still a knockout… But, you know, that’s what burlesque was. It wasn’t about the strip. It was all about the tease."