Druids, Magic, and Groupie Girls (& Boys)

This summer you might have glimpsed shape-shifting producer and performer The Swedish Housewife singing with The Fastbacks, hosting A Mid-Century Modern Celebration at The Triple Door, or demonstrating how to correctly butcher a chicken while in full Swedish Housewife regalia at Bumbershoot (dutifully pitching in for the launch of Kurt B. Reighley’s book United States of Americana: Backyard Chickens, Burlesque Beauties, and Handmade Bitters: A Field Guide to the New American Roots Movement). If such a display demonstrates how far removed from the production process modern end-users are today, Paula- aka The Swedish Housewife- is the antithesis. As a producer, if anyone can open a can of worms and dream up a full-scale, 90 minute production featuring custom sets and a 20+ cast of vanguard dancers, musicians, and burlesquers, it’s The Swedish Housewife. The woman just won’t sit still.

House of Thee Unholy, now in its fourth year, takes over The Triple Door this weekend for five shows in three nights. Billed as a rock-lesque extravaganza, initial inspiration and visual cues were culled from the rich album covers of the 70s and in the host of talented dancers and musicians Seattle is home to. Putting a burlesque spin on the hedonistic decade’s music was aided by an all-star band including Nick Garrison, belter Jen Ayers, drummer Charlie Lorme, and the return of soulful singer/actress Sarah Rudinoff. “Blues music is great for strip-tease,” says Paula (in conversation, she leans heavily on the second syllable). “And the 70s had really great, bluesy rock going on. It’s not a narrative performance- it’s more like an acid trip.”

The monstrous ensemble show updates what is perceived as burlesque and levels the playing field between male and female performers, musicians and dancers. Like most of her productions, House feels very grown up- feral women in power positions, men taking off their clothes, sexuality that is sophisticated and doesn’t pander to the cute or the coy. Viking ships, orgies, druids, sirens, zeppelins, and general excess are much more aligned with Paula’s Oz-like scope. There’s so much happening onstage it’s hard to take in; not to mention the sheer volume of dancers in various states of undress. Waxie Moon, Lily Verlaine, Miss Indigo Blue, Inga Ingénue, Lou Henry Hoover, Heidi Von Haught, Polly Wood, Leroi The Girl Boi, Gerard Delacroix, Douglas Ridings, Paris Original, Lydia McLane, and of course, The Swedish Housewife, will burlesque the 70s- sometimes en masse.

This year’s run will be the last for a while, as Paula sinks her teeth into another genre rife with button-pushing possibilities, glam rock. More details TBD on the new spring show… for now, get thee to the Triple Door.

http://burlesqueseattle.com/2010/09/22/druids-magic-and-groupie-girls-boys/ 

Burlesque back on Bourbon Street in French Quarter

The burlesque revival in the United States began in earnest during the early ’90’s and has, after nearly two decades (almost the length of burlesque’s original heyday) hit critical mass. Neo-burlesque has spawned multiple conferences and festivals — including the inaugural New Orleans Burlesque Festival in 2009 — at least one bona fide international celebrity in Dita von Teese, and hundreds of troupes around the world whose styles of strut and flounce run the gamut from historical authenticity to punk-rock feminist gender commentary, and many variations in between.

 Greg Miles/HandoutTrixie Minx is striving for a party-like atmosphere in her new Burlesque Ballroom show at the Irvin Mayfield Playhouse on Bourbon Street. 

The blonde gamine Trixie Minx leads the third burlesque troupe to be in residence at 615 Toulouse St. since 1999, when the Shim Sham Club debuted the thrillingly extravagant Shim Shamettes. The Shamettes were named in homage to the original Shim Sham Club, which was operated on Bourbon Sttreet in the ’30’s by Louis Prima’s brother Leon.
Their show illustrated that commitment to the past, with routines from the middle of the 20th century passed down by their original performers, such as Evangeline the Oyster Girl. Minx, who is as much a comedienne as a slinky ecdysiast, brought a little something different to the table when her Fleur de Tease group became the house troupe at the club, now One Eyed Jacks. (One recent Fleur de Tease dance was a can-can set to the music of the MC5’s “Kick Out The Jams,” performed in Converse All-Stars.)
The Burlesque Ballroom at Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse at the Royal Sonesta is Minx’s latest venture, and true to form, it’s something different. For one, the slapstick element of Minx’s goofy sense of humor has been removed for the jazz-club crowd.
Unlike most neo-burlesque shows, the Ballroom is not a stage show presented as if it were theater. Even if the vision for the weekly night didn’t preclude that, the room would; the Jazz Playhouse’s stage barely fits Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown’s quartet, let alone a dancer. So performers in Trixie’s show use the whole space, including a tiny area in front of the stage, customer’s tabletops, and the aisles between them. Remember Jessica Rabbit’s jaw-dropping crawl through the nightclub in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” It’s kind of like that.
The relaxed structure of the show was a joint idea of Minx and the Playhouse staff. The band and dancers share the spotlight, and the very dapper, dry-witted Brown — still crisp in his three-piece suit after a long night that began with an 8 p.m. set — appears as able an accidental burlesque emcee as he is a bandleader.
The addition of a live band always adds an extra, kinetic element of excitement to burlesque, and the laid-back vibe of the show contributed to that even more so. An unplanned drum solo during one of Minx’s performances, set to Louis Prima’s “Banana Split For My Baby,” played like a wild improvised duet for derriere and snare.
No matter how hot the combo, they’re at risk for fading into the background when there are also women with few clothes on onstage. Since the dancers used the whole club to perform — and the ratio of striptease numbers to songs the band played with no dancer was about even — the audience’s attention could, and did, go anywhere.
“I met up with Irvin Mayfield, and we discussed trying to create something new that’s not your typical show,” Minx said. “The main focus with the Burlesque Ballroom is trying to break down the typical barriers between the performer and the audience.”
“Once we hit seven nights of live music, we were looking for creative ways to extend the Playhouse hours and introduce jazz to new audiences,” Mayfield said. “We came up with the idea of collaborating with Trixie Minx and expanding into the ’Round Midnight time slot...,” Mayfield said. (The burlesque show is part of the Playhouse’s new late-night events, called ’Round Midnight. On Saturday, after the 8 p.m. show, the Soul Rebels Brass Band and other brass bands perform.)
“We created an intimate, sexy, jazzy, after-hours destination for mature local audiences,” he said.At the inaugural show on Dec. 11, there was a sharp attrition rate in the packed house after the first hour or so, possibly due to the late hour (the Burlesque Ballroom runs from midnight til 2 a.m.) but the later it got, the more the room took on the vibe of a louche, swanky late-night party. At some point after 1 a.m., Mayfield himself dropped in, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and took the stage for a dynamic wake-up of a dueling-trumpet jam with Brown.
The only thing disappointing about Brown’s quartet — and this is purely burlesque-wise — was the lack of a saxophone. Sax can express sexiness like no other instrument; during a striptease, drums snap and pop on the bumps, but the long bleat of the sax is the soundtrack of the grind. Drums are the punctuation; the sax is the sentence. Brown is a masterful horn blower, but the lighter tones of his trumpet just didn’t carry the weight of so many undulating hips.
Attendees at the Burlesque Ballroom are having a last-stop-of-the-night experience very similar to what their counterparts on Bourbon Street saw after midnight 50 or 60 years ago.
“The mission of the event is not to have people just sit down and observe, but to really get into it and feel like dancing too,” Minx said. “Like they’re at a party.”

http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2010/01/burlesque_back_on_bourbon_stre.html 

Burlesque is Busting Out on Main Street

                                         By Vee Benard

The Sag Harbor Cinema, tucked in the middle of Main Street, is about to revisit its former identity as a vaudeville house: this Friday, filmmaker and Sag Harbor resident Gary Beeber is holding the local premiere of his film “Dirty Martini and the New Burlesque” at the cinema, the screening of which will be followed later that night by a live burlesque performance featuring two of the film’s stars.

“Dirty Martini and the New Burlesque” is a feature-length documentary about the global resurgence of burlesque in recent years. Released in early 2010 in collaboration with the Seattle International Film Festival, the film premiered at the Moisture Festival in Seattle to wide critical acclaim. Beeber says that the film has now traveled to cities all over the U.S. and Canada, from the Toronto Burlesque Festival to Dallas’ U.S.A. Film festival.

Burlesque, which took root in late 19^th century America, hit its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, after which point it suffered a slow decline in popularity chiefly as a result of its promiscuous content.

As Beeber explains, what was later associated with the term “burlesque” was really something entirely different.

“What they were calling ‘burlesque,’” he clarified, “was really lap dancing and other performances you might find in strip clubs. New burlesque comes from modern dance and performance art.”

Dirty Martini, who, as a burlesque performer, has hands-on experience with the evolution and misconceptions of the burlesque form, agrees with Beeber’s conclusion; but where he claims that burlesque was “dead in New York” prior to its comeback in the 1980s, Dirty Martini says that “burlesque never left New York City.”

“In fact,” she continued, “it was New York that really carried the torch for burlesque during those years. New York has always been open, always been experimental…and drag queens also played a large part in keeping that spirit alive.”

As Tigger! — another burlesque legend featured in Beeber’s film, who is dubbed “The Godfather of Boylesque,” “The Original King of Boylesque,” and the first-ever winner of “Mr. Exotic World” (an honor Beeber compared to winning an Academy Award) —

Tigger! (exclamation point required) explains that he, Dirty Martini, and the few other performers who have been involved with the resurgence of burlesque, are “accidental founders” of the new burlesque movement, their interest in the form born from a “frustration with the limitations of the art forms we were already in.”

“Burlesque allows us to bring forms together,” said Tigger!, who was cast in a production of “Much Ado About Nothing” the same day he received the honor of “Mr. Exotic World.”

One of the biggest threats to the widespread acceptance of burlesque is its frequent confusion with erotic stripping. As Dirty Martini describes it, burlesque is, put simply “a theatrical form without words.”

“I’ve been a dancer since I was six,” she shared. After moving to New York to become a modern dancer, she found it difficult to find a niche for her body type.

 “People who once would have used ‘differently-sized’ dancers,” she said, “had moved on and started using cookie cutter bodies, which made it so hard for me to find an outlet to perform. When I started to do research, I looked at old videos of burlesque and loved it. It features all body types, it showcases them all.”

Beyond offering an informative glimpse into the burlesque world, all parties involved with the production of “Dirty Martini and the New Burlesque” hope that audiences take away messages of positive body image and female empowerment after watching the film.

“I dare them to try not to!” joked Dirty Martini. “It’s not a preachy film. It’s a beautiful film about people working, working hard, making friends and family in a world that gives them support they might not get elsewhere.”

“Yes, you’re going to see gender play,” she said, “you’re going to see different body types, and different kinds of people, wacky people.”

 “This film truly puts women in a positive light,” said Beeber. “Women nowadays have some imaginary problem with their bodies. This film shows that it’s not how you look on the outside, it’s how beautiful you are on the inside.”

“Our job is to deliver a fun time,” said Tigger!, “and yet there is still an implicit message of combining sex, humor and personal liberation.”

“You learn to be more comfortable with your own self,” he said, “It’s not about having the most beautiful body in the room, it’s about understanding how absolutely beautiful every body in the room is.”

Despite the film’s tour around the country, this Friday’s event will be in a class of its own. The evening will start out with a “Pre-movie Gala” at the Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery right next door from 9:30 to 11 p.m., during which time guests will be able to meet both Dirty Martini and Tigger!. Immediately following the screening, Dirty Martini and Tigger! will offer a live performance in the Cinema.

“The performances will be really, really amazing,” said Beeber. “Dirty Martini is a superstar of burlesque. Just the idea of being able to have her in Sag Harbor at all is pretty amazing.”

The Sag Harbor premiere of Gary Beeber’s “Dirty Martini and the New Burlesque” will be this Friday, August 13 at 11 p.m. with a Pre-movie gala and champagne reception next door at 9 p.m. at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery. Tickets are available at the Sag Harbor Cinema, 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor and cost $15 in advance, $20 day-of.

http://sagharboronline.com/sagharborexpress/page-1/burlesque-is-busting-out-on-main-street-8881