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First Time Follies Indeed
It’s fairly cold Thursday night and my usual marathon of How I Met your Mother was about to be cut short as I was heading to Skinny Pete’s First Time Follies burlesque show at Orange Street in Canterbury in 2 hours. I must admit after agreeing to take on this assignment, I, myself was questioning Burlesque itself – what was it? For me, I had always had the perception that it was ‘fancy stripping,’ a tasteful and more acceptable way of taking off your clothes, mainly because it had old fashion origins. However, for the simple fact the Burlesque is heading to Canterbury is reason enough to for me to take note on it having some deeper artistic qualities as Canterbury isn’t what one would call ‘sin city.’
After this internal debate, I head down to Orange Street and open the main doors to an array of women dotted around various sets of tables and chairs fashioned in elaborate 1920s to 1950s garments, I almost feel underdressed. However, a couple of minutes later that feeling becomes silenced when the realisation kicks in that I am one of the few members of the audience dressed up in 50s styled garments and for a moment I’m even mistaken for one of performance members, when a stagehand asked me in the process of me taking off my coat “are you performing tonight?” But then remembering my 1950’s obsessed friend Courtney’s (who I thankfully invited) passion for this homage to the old times, she luckily arrives her 50’s get-up to save me from any further embarrassment. I instantly fall in love with her the minute she tells me she thought others were going dress up and how that same stagehand had stopped her as soon as she walked in.
Yet, I am still like many others in the audience; we are virgins to the Burlesque experience, not knowing what to expect, or how to dress, just trying to understand how it all works. This fact was caught on by the host Miss Glory Pearl as she begins the show giving us a mini demonstration into the art of ‘wooing.’ She then goes on to tell us that the show gives girls and women who aspire to be a part the Burlesque scene a chance to strut their stuff on stage and find a new performer.
The show gets underway beginning with Trixie O’Neil an average size woman seeming in her 50s dressed in a cleaning lady’s uniform. Her routine starts off with her playfully trying to be a sexy burlesque dancer, performing moves that are known to be deliberately sexy like, shaking one’s hips, to her then finding herself materialising in her created role with the help of audience’s playful encouragement. It is by the end of the routine you become aware of the elements to a style of Burlesque– this idea of ‘cheesecake’ Burlesque where the routines have tongue and cheek tendencies as well as being quite ‘frivolous’ as Pete had mention in an earlier interview. It’s carefully planned and requires audience participation to ‘solicit’ further reaction to the incident.
Later on in the show we saw an almost identical performance come up in the shape of Pixie Frisk, a much younger and less curvy than O’Neil, who I think due to being an actress by profession made her act more believable. Yet many of the acts following or in between had some sort of gimmick; some sang, some had an incidences and play on them and some created characters, which to some degree made the performance more than just being ‘frivolous.’ Nonethless, not all were as successful, as Miss Kandy Sprinkles (one of few women that caught my eye) who was voted the best act twice by audience and the panel of judges with her rendition on the idea the ‘big girls are beautiful’ (and yes the Mika song was played in the background towards the end); winning at top spot on Skinny Pete’s next professional Burlesque night.
A couple of days after the event I thought about the Burlesque scene and what it was. I’m beginning to understand the ideas behind it and what draws it further and further away from this stereotype of a derogatory ‘tidied-up’ or ‘elaborate’ version of stripping. Burlesque has all these misconceptions as people don’t seem to look beyond the minor nudity and see that it deals with the empowerment of women, saying it doesn’t matter what age or shape or size you are, you can perform too. Most importantly, there’s a craft to it that each initially performer follows, for the simple fact that one person can tell when someone is doing it wrong, shows that there must be more to it that ‘just stripping;’ there is a method to its art. But not everyone has the friend giving you that history lesson on Burlesque or a Skinny Pete showcasing his love. Burlesque is in that same debate of whether nudity in the name of art can be classified as art rather than just being simple pornography and I for one am starting to fight on the side of art.