Burlesque For The Sake Of Beauty
Published on Monday 1st March, 3.41pm, Written by Jonathan Dudley
Ladies and gentleman, I love burlesque.
I love old burlesque, I love new burlesque, I even love clumsy amateur burlesque but some people don’t love burlesque and they don’t love it for the most peculiar reason.
You see, dear reader, some folk’s biggest problem with burlesque is that — shock horror — it has changed over the past 100-plus years.
Even in the middle of a highly complimentary five star review of Miss Polly Rae: The All New Hurly Burly Show, The Guardian’s Michael Billington felt the need to point out: “To be pedantic, burlesque was a rowdy mix of disrobing and double-entendre that flourished in the US from 1900 to 1935.”
It strikes me as odd that in the world of performing arts — a world where boundaries are pushed and definitions are changed regularly — burlesque is expected to stay the same. Are the same people who dismiss the performances of Miss Polly Rae, Immodesty Blaize and Dita Von Teese as “not proper burlesque” all writing angry emails to the RSC for daring to put on modern-dress productions of Shakespearean drama? No, probably not.
Times change; sure burlesque may have put some of its more overtly political and satirical elements on the back burner but let’s be honest, we live in a far more liberated world than the one which spawned burlesque. We’re free to discuss and satirise the misdemeanours of the elite. Every other website, magazine or newspaper has something to say about George Bush, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama or the latest “fat” celeb. Do we really need to be subjected to other people’s socio-political opinions in a burlesque show?
Surely it’s nice to watch a show that lacks a political agenda, a show which chooses not to present the world in that sneering, ironic way that has become the norm. We should be glad that burlesque now exists as a celebration of the feminine, the beautiful and the titillating.
Who cares if it’s a bit more polished and has abandoned the agenda that it only picked up to justify its own existence in the first place?
Not me.
IT’S. BILLINGTON.