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Showing posts with label burlesque. Show all posts
Showing posts with label burlesque. Show all posts
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Thursday, May 16, 2019
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Reviewed by David James
Rating: 
Sometimes all you need is fire, sex and alcohol. Bernie Dieter's Little Death Club provides all three in the form of a slick, stylish, satirical and salaciously wonderful 'kabarett' that delights with polished dangerousness.
The core of the show, is Dieter herself, looking every inch the distillation of Weimar style, as if she's wandered off the set of a particularly stylish silent movie. She behaves on stage as if she was born on one, sinuously prowling around on spike-studded heels in a feathered black bodysuit. It's equal parts sexy and scary, and if (to be honest, it's probably when) she turns her gaze to you it's like being frozen in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler.
Though there's a warning on the door about fire being used in the show, the real danger comes as Dieter casts her gaze around the audience and finds unsuspecting men to single out and charm. Ordinarily, I'd say if you're shy and awkward stay away from the front row, but here even hiding in the back rows isn't necessarily a defence (as the guy who ended up with her crotch being ground in his face discovered).
For me, the thrill at being prey to a predatory performer is exciting, fun and has provided some of my favourite experiences in theatre over the years. So when I was inevitably singled out for during a song punctuated by yells of "EAT MY PUSSY!" I enjoyed the hell out of that adrenaline rush.
But though this is very much Dieter's show, she's also the Professor X to a wonderfully weird collection of misfits. These include wonderfully gloomy mime Josh Glanc, who bemoans the lack of reality inherent to his art, wishing that one day the box he could escape from would be a real one. We enjoy Myra DuBois: "The Songbird of South Yorkshire", a classic drag queen who I don't think it's possible to not find funny.
Then there's an extraordinary fire show from Kitty Bang Bang. This begins promisingly, with two assistants quietly appearing near the front of the stage with blankets, presumably to put her out if she ignites. I've seen a whole bunch of fire performances before, but what she does here beyond my understanding. I know the basic rules of how these acts work - that heat and flame travel upward and so on. But fire is hot - there is no trick that makes fire not hot. So I have absolutely no idea how she manages to stand with flames flickering from her lips without burning herself. Maybe she really is a mutant?
Similarly mesmeric is Beau Sargent's contortion and acrobatics act. Sargeant has one of the most beautiful bodies I've seen on stage, his fat-free musculature making him appear as a streamlined art deco sculpture. There's a simmering sexual androgyny in the way he writhes and twists, eventually spinning high above us in precise whirls from a hoop. It's breathtaking stuff.
But my fave thing in the night was Fancy Chance's dream-like hair suspension act. I've seen a bunch of these before and while they're impressive, seeing someone simply gracefully enduring pain just isn't enough. But Fancy Chance provides that something else with an outright beautiful routine based around a flowing dress with wings. Here she swoops, glides and soars above the audience, the breeze created by her wings gently buffetting our faces. This is all soundtracked to a bass-heavy song that slaps extremely hard. It also has an incredible final flourish that I will not spoil here. When I look back on this show, I feel it'll be her act that lodges firmly in the mind.
Towards the end of the show we get a moment of insight and perspective. Dieter reminds us that the original Weimar cabaret (and indeed, the Weimar Republic itself) was squashed by the rise of fascists. She talks of the increasingly scary world beyond the confines of this tent - hinting that history may be repeating itself.
But if the world really is ending, I can't think of any party I'd rather be at than this one. Little Death Club is one hell of an hour's entertainment - worth the price of admission many times over.
Little Death Club is at Udderbelly Festival until 23 June.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
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I try keep a cool, analytical mind at every event I attend, but there's only so much my brain can cope with when I'm presented with strobe lights, billowing clouds of dry ice and sexy girls in ape masks re-enacting the Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons. Dammit - I'm only human.
SuicideGirls is an online community, business and publishing concern founded with one goal: "to see hot punk rock girls naked." From this zen-like ideal sprung forth legions of snarling pale-skinned women with bad attitudes, fancifully dyed hair, clanking heaps of piercings and whose skin is covered in burning skulls, bloody knives and satanic symbols. These girls have bad news written all over them. Sometimes literally.
Founders Sean Stuhl and Missy Suicide may as well have struck oil when they hit upon this concept (though the tidal wave of gushing fluids they unleashed on the world is of a somewhat lighter shade). And so in a torrent of studded leather bras, Bettie Page fringes and barbell piercings they cornered the hipster/alternagirl/punk rock pin-up market, releasing books, DVDs, movies, video games, comics, magazines, music videos and an international tour. That last one, the Blackheart Burlesque, is where I come in.
It's a Saturday night in Camden Town, and the Electric Ballroom is packed to the rafters with the usual gang of punks, meatheads, geeks, sluts, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, sadgoths and creeps. By a hair this is a mainly male crowd but there's a sizeable female contingent, who coolly survey the venue with kohl-lidded eyes. Everyone expectantly gazes towards the stage, hundred of heads bobbing in happy unison as Zack de la Rocha screams out the up-yours chorus of Killing in the Name Of and Kurt Cobain sings about mulattos, albinos and mosquitoes.
Then the women take to the stage. There's a chorus of obnoxious hoots from the meatheads, polite applause from the geeks and shrieks of pleasure from the sluts. Clad in animal onesies, they enter to the booming bass of Die Antwoord's trash-rap hit Cookie Thumper. Tossing primary coloured hair, shaking wobbly bits and sporting demented dominatrix grins, the girls groove in synchronisation, quickly discarding away the onesies and strutting about the stage wearing only black tape over their nipples and SuicideGirls branded knickers.
Theoretically burlesque is all about the quasi-mystical "art of the tease", but by the time Yolandi Visser has stopped ranting about her 'snoekie cookie' we've seen pretty much all of these women that we're going to. The next 90 or so minutes are repetitions on the same thing; combining something from cult/geek culture with tits, fire and loud music. So you get, among others, sexy Lara Croft, sexy Link from Zelda, sexy Pokemon, sexy The Little Mermaid and sexy Star Wars. You get the picture.
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| and sexy superheroes |
Can a show really maintain our attention for 90 minutes or so by doing what amounts to the same thing over and over again? Annoyingly the answer appears to be yes. There were moments during Blackheart Burlesque where I actively tried not to enjoy it. I couldn't. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was being caught up in the crowd, maybe it was the enthusiasm radiating off the stage. Or maybe it was the tits and ass.
It's a bit depressing that I'm able to be led around so easily, the caveman part of my brain grabbing the controls and transforming me from cultured man-about-town to the kind of drooling dog-like creature you'd normally see in a Tex Avery cartoon. Dragging my eyes away from the stage for a moment I took a quick peek at the rest of the crowd. Line after line of glassy-eyed stares greeted me, mouths slightly hanging open to the point where you expect to see a legion of mop-wielding drool cleaners rolling up their sleeves as the curtain falls. God only knows what we look like from the perspective of the stage.
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| sexy stormtroopers |
Midway through comes two interludes that break things up a bit. The first is an apparently traditional crowd participation bit. The compère calls out to the "sexy girls" in the audience and invites them up on stage. To the glute wobbling bass of Major Lazer's Bubble Butt they're encouraged to gyrate, wiggle and show off a bit of skin. This splits the girls into two camps; the first eager to rip their clothes away and shake what they've got and those whose smiles slip into dread, realising they might have gotten in slightly over their head.
The philosophy of SuicideGirls is to empower women by granting those with non-mainstream bodies an opportunity to be adored. There's the odd moment where this feels a tad flimsy, none more so than a somewhat regrettable segment where a man from the audience is summoned on stage and ordered to memorise a sheet of paper. He's stymied by a gyrating Suicide Girl who flashes her arse, spreads her legs and rubs her tits in his face. This is less metropolitan, sexually liberated feminism and more Stella-soaked stag night in Margate.
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| This pic sums up the night pretty well. |
The Blackheart Burlesque is precision-engineered to appeal to people who grew up kissing people with tongue studs, tracing the outlines of tattoos on their partner's back and for whom liberally applying talcum powder is an essential part of the dressing up process. This subcultural veil is tossed over the whole affair, rendering it just about artistic enough to conceal the seamier strip-show routine that's the skeleton of the night.
If you squint a bit, toss down a couple of beers and stroke your chin you can just about convince yourself 'hey maybe this whole thing is a legitimate cultural exercise'. That's what I'm going to keep telling myself anyway.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
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Last night the druids gathered at Stonehenge for the winter Solstice: Alban Arthur. On the freezing Wiltshire fields, clad in velvet capes, antler headdresses, brass torcs and flint-topped staffs they celebrated the return of the 'Divine Child', the rebirth of the Sun. Meanwhile in Shoreditch I was at my very own bacchanalia, but the Divine we worship is far less spiritual and far more trashy.
This is Dreams from the Darkness: a relatively low-key gathering of beautiful freaks, sadistic psychopaths and sexual predators. Taking place in Through the Looking Glass we occupy their back room. Though the 'secret bar' is a little old-hat by now, there's still a thrill in peeling back some item of furniture to reveal a 'hidden' place; be they inside fridges, through wardrobes or in this case, concealed by a gigantic mirror.
Hosted by Rubyyy Jones (last seen at Mimetic's Young Feminist Whores), the night features four performers. First up was drag queen Ragina LeLumpi, whose heels and bouffant wig left her not just towering over the audience, but threatening the lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The first performance was good, but it was in the second that she really shined. In Snow Queen regalia, soundtracked by Bjork's Pagan Poetry, Frosti and Kate Bush's December Will Be Magic Again, the act became 'A Very Shoreditch Solistice', especially when she sprinkled fake snow over the audience.
Towards the back of room, two burly Men's Health-lookin' bartenders regarded all this with suspicion. You get the feeling that a) this cabaret crowd isn't the type to glug down £10 cocktails and b) they're used to a swankier corporate clientèle than this misfit flotsam and jetsam that's rocked up on their shore tonight. They perhaps hit their tolerance ceiling with Rubyyyy Jones' song about shoes. Preceded by a long dialogue extract from John Waters' Female Trouble, the performance ends up with incoherent naked yelling and the aggressive hurling of heels at the bar, behind which stood the two increasingly unimpressed looking bartenders.
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| Desmond O'Connor |
After the interval we were informed that we'd come this close to being unceremoniously ejected from the venue. It would have made for a good story, but given what was to come I'm glad it didn't happen. Then again, the night was to head even closer to the bone with the appearance of Blair the Bipolar Bear aka Desmond O'Connor. After a jaunty song about finding one's calling as a "cracker joke packer at a cracker packing factory" he segued into a song about a child being raped on Christmas Eve.
Ah, nothin' guaranteed to get an audience feeling festive like the musical tale of a kid being bummed up the arse by Father Christmas. As he sang "God rest ye mental men" and "violent night / unholy night" while tossing a suspiciously lubed carrot into the story, you wonder for a moment if this is really what you want to see just before you decamp to relative's houses for babies, mulled wine and mince pies.
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| Constance Peach |
Similar Christmas perversions were to come with the entrance of Constance Peach. Dressed in a little girl nightie and to the tune of Cloudbusting (Kate Bush has certainly had a popular year in burlesque) she constructs a voodoo doll Santa from a pillow and a pound shop costume. Dancing around with it she eventually plucks a man from the audience and treats him to a Christmas themed lapdance. Gold corsets are ripped off, pasties are exposed, tits are jigged; it's all a damn good time. I've seen a hell of a lot of burlesque acts; and let's face it, a lot of them are pretty crappy. Now there's not much that's mindboggling new in Peach's act, but dammit, she does what she does well.
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| Tatiana Diavoletto |
As good as that was, the toppermost of the poppermost here was undoubtedly Tatiana Diavoletto, who radiates the easy confidence of someone who knows they're the most graceful person in the room. Within a lineup of sexual chaos and sly innuendo, her dancing has an artistic purity that sets her apart from the rest.. It's all too easy for a performer to shock by flashing your genitals at a crowd, but it feels far more profound to shock with beauty. So to Jules Massenet's heavenly music from Manon she wowed the crowd into total submission. It's kind of a cheesy reference, but I was reminded of a quote from The Shawshank Redemption: "It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away."
Maybe I should check out some ballet sometime. I had a lovely night - all the better for the slightly low-key, chilled out and friendly atmosphere. This felt like a crowd of cabaret veterans, both on stage and in the audience, everyone on the same page and easy in each other's company. And if we're going to ring in the Solstice I'd much rather do it surrounded by drag queens, ballerinas and filthy minstrels than beardy old druids hugging chilly old rocks.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Sunday, November 30, 2014
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Well with a name like that how I could I resist? I figured if any show was going to get right up in my face with wide-eyed, experimental, angry-as-all-fuck political theatre it was going to be whatever Young Feminist Whores was. As it turned out they were pretty young. And they loudly shouted their 'whore-pride' (as the compère put it "you call us a whore it's a fucking compliment!") but feminist? Well... I dunno.
The evening turned out to be a relatively traditional neo-burlesque show, with the familiar old parade of tassles, sequins, pop music, glitter and elaborate (yet easy to remove) costumes. Our compère was Rubyyy Jones, a self-described "big fat fabulous queer Canadian", who did her best to whip the crowd up into a frenzy and laid out the basic tenets of the burlesque philosophy. Prime among these is the notion that burlesque is an individual performative expression.
From what I can gather, the ideal burlesque performance allows a woman to reclaim her body from patriarchal objectification. In devising a performance that emphasises personal tastes, generally a cocktail of comedy, sexuality and forthright body positivity, you achieve a kind of personal liberation. You're still being objectified, but in burlesque the performer chooses their own objectification, with the audience in the palm of their hand. Elsewhere the power dynamic lies with the audience and their fistfuls of sweaty five pound notes, in burlesque it's entirely with the performer.
Problem is that all too often both boil down to the same thing: a roomful of people hooting and whistling at a woman furiously twirling sparkly nipple tassles. So where does this leave Young Feminist Whores? For long portions its an entertaining, if slightly predictable, burlesque evening. So there's the sexy fan dance, a clown routine and a flamenco-y Spanish routine. All are focussed, talented performers, but we've all seen this before. Give me novelty, dammit!
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| Pearl Grey at Burlesque Idol 2014 |
By far the best of the traditional performers was Pearl Grey, who just the previous night won Burlesque Idol 2014. Dressed in a dazzling self-made Elizabeth I costume, sporting sky-high cheekbones and the haughtiest of haughty looks she dances to Lorde's Royals. The sight of this sets off all my happy, smiley neurons, reawakening a hitherto forgotten teenage crush on Miranda Richardson in Blackadder II. Just as we're settling into the rhythm of Royals, the act takes a swerve to the cheesy with a transition in Can't Touch This. This is accompanied by a gold bondage vest and ass tassles, which I figure are hard as hell to get to swerve. It's easy to see why Pearl Grey won big the night before.
That was great, but there was one act that stood head and shoulders above the rest, probably because it wasn't really burlesque at all. That was Scarlett O'Whorea, who did a powerfully intense bit of mini-theatre confessional to what I instantly recognised as the supersecret hidden track tucked away at the end of Jagged Little Pill. I was faintly astonished - I haven't heard or thought about this song in years. Scarlett's act, much like Alanis Morrissette's vocal performance, works to strip away layers of performative bullshit and reveal an emotional core.
Cards on the table, the 'art of the tease' doesn't really do much for me. It's an archaic aesthetic, one designed by Victorian men in the late 1800s, deeply conservative and old fashioned in how it presents the female body. Scarlett busted this shit right off the map by quickly stripping down completely naked and staying that way for most of her act. This feels like real body liberation, the raw emotion and matter-of-fact nakedness throwing a harsh light over the chintzy camp of the rest of the show. But then, this wasn't really burlesque - more straight up kickin' rad performance art.
Scarlett's was the only act I'd unquestionably call feminist. At this point you might be wondering: who the fuck does this guy think he is? For me to imperiously march around waving my big review writing pen and saying that X is feminist and Y isn't is a bit rich. If these performers feel liberated who is anybody to tell them they're not?
While I've got no doubt that performing burlesque can be an intensely liberating experience, it doesn't necessarily automatically make it a feminist one. I guess the obvious counter-argument is that allowing women the space to make their own decision to perform how they choose is an intrinsically feminist act. But while the act of choosing indicates autonomy, the actual choice made as a result of that autonomy isn't necessarily feminist. For example, I don't think a Tea Party Republican woman choosing to vote to restrict access to contraception is at all a feminist act.
Maybe I'm arguing in circles here. My real problem stems from the compère angrily explaining that this definitely isn't one of those shows where women take off more clothes the more we cheer. Instead it's one of those shows where the more clothes a woman takes off, the more we cheer. The former is the epitome of misogynistic objectification, the latter is apparently an act of powerful liberation.
Maybe this just isn't my kinda thing.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Sunday, November 23, 2014
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I suspect my perspective on what's normal and what's not has become irretrievably skewed. By way of an example: I'm sitting in a damp tunnel underneath Waterloo station watching an intensely bearded man screeching maniacally into a microphone. He's smeared in clownish drag makeup, is wearing a Little Miss Muffet wig and a white wedding dress with shit-smears of Nutella down the sides and is vigorously pumping two very hairy arms. Accompanying him are two burly yet feminine slaves in moth-eaten, stained animal masks who periodically grimace from pools of darkness. The soundtrack? Miley Cyrus' Bangerz.
It's like Paul Dacre's nightmare brought to horrible life; a kaleidoscope of genderfucked midnight-movie sexuality and punk rock rotten-ness. Me? I'm sitting there in the front row drinking a beer and having a remarkably pleasant time. Where oh where did it all go wrong?
Baby Lame exists within a very particular subset of trash exploitation. The ur-example is obviously John Waters movies, Baby Lame aiming at being the spiritual successor to the outstandingly successful Divine. These are big heels to fill; Divine having left in her trail a litany of self destruction, drugged/boozed out chaos and intensely sexually aggressive filth. There's also odd notes of Divine David aka David Hoyle peppered through the glitter, sweat and goo that fills the act.
To be disgusting and repellent on stage isn't as easy as you might think. Audiences can smell fear a mile away, if you don't hurl yourself into this with palpable abandon then people might suspect that your heart's not in it, causing to terror to transform into its polar opposite, pity. Baby Lame doesn't have to worry about that though, the domineering, ultra surety that fills this performance has the effect of transforming her into a lion and us into frightened sheep.
In contrast with some of the other acts I'd seen at Mimetic who quickly built a chummy rapport with their audience, Baby Lame eyes them more as a resource to exploit and humiliate. Two men are dragged on stage as part of the performance; one is given a face distortingly ugly half face mask and duct-taped to a chair while monstrosities cavort around, and the other is press-ganged into a warped marriage ceremony while Nutella is smeared over his face in an approximation of excrement.
Bubbling under the surface is a skewering of celebrity. With the towering ego, tasteless attire and entourage of yes-things Baby Lame works as the logical conclusion to the shit you see on the front page of crappy celeb rags. Video segments splice together Lame and Winfrey; responding to her sensitive questions by vomiting chewed up cake from her crimson lips and laughing like a clogged up drain.
It's nauseating, nasty and sinister stuff, the audience departing with the kinds of stares you see in the eyes of soldiers returning from wars. But you can develop strange tastes over time. Some sing the tasty praises of crunching down bull testicles. Some find beauty in endless, industrially obnoxious, machinelike techno. Some get their thrills from being trussed up and pissed on. Some (like me) get their illicit thrills from mad-mental performances like this.
By now you can probably judge whether you'd enjoy Baby Lame or not. I certainly did. This kind of stuff is totally up my street. But then I do live in a bad part of town.
As I walked home I was cheerily singing; "you can put it in my front-bum, but not in my bum-bum". Thisearned me a few sideways glances but, well, when you've got an earworm you can't really help yourself. This was what I was left with after The Ruby Darlings: a cheeky, sexy and very, very funny cabaret. They are Ruby (Rachel Le Moeligou) and Darling (Lily Phillips), ably supported by David Tims, who provides both musical accompaniment and an excellent straight man.
Feminism and fun are two words that (unfairly in my book) don't tend to be found in the same sentence. All too often tabloids, shit TV and arsehole media in general paint a picture of some hatchet-faced, humourless harridan out to spoil everyone's fun. Yet here, with smiles as smooth as quicksilver, machine gun fast innuendos and subject matter that leaves suspicious stains, we see a feminism that easily dazzles and thrills the crowd.
Ruby and Darling aren't ladettes, they aren't caricatured horny slappers and they certainly aren't sexually submissive waifs - they're simply open and honest about their sexual pleasures. Capturing this tone successfully is like trying to pinch a housefly between chopsticks: trickier than it sounds. Travel too far into depravity and you become a lech; relying in mere gross-out humour to earn your giggles. Keep things too prim and proper and what's the point?
The critical factor at play here is intelligence, specifically in constructing wonderful feats of sexy wordplay. Rhymes stack upon each other, the songs reaching to dizzying heights of cleverness and complexity. In particular, a folk-esque pastiche about dongs (which sounds like it might have been sung by a drunk Joan Baez) seriously impressed; being simultaneously musically excellent, lyrically complex and funny as all hell.
With a set list that covers pubic hair, naming vaginas, cocks, STIs, anal sex, bestiality, and queefing The Ruby Darlings are never going to get booked for children's parties and weddings (maybe really fun weddings), but it's worthwhile having a think about precisely which tradition they fall into. With the sexy costumes and fucking-focussed tunes there's obvious parallels with burlesque, but they prevent such an easy classification. Layered on are hints of the saucy beachside postcard, end-of-the-pier variety shows and Carry On films - all of which adds up an act that's intensely, powerfully, wonderful British. We're reminded that we like talking about sex, especially when its wreathed in irony and humour.
I had a wonderful time at this show. All three performers were friendly, open and intensely charismatic. They developed a conspiratorial rapport with the audience almost immediately; and unlike so many acts nobody looks terrified when they're asked to participate. By the time we're in the final song about anal sex, the whole room is on its feet waving placards in the air. The warm spaces under Waterloo are filled with drunk smiles and happy.
I laughed my ass off. Be sure to check them out if you get the chance.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Thursday, April 10, 2014
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I like Soho. I like the piss-addled alleys. I like the bitchy queens hanging around outside the Admiral Duncan. I like Gosh! Comics. I like the neon soaked sex shops. I like Maoz Falafel. And I especially like Madame JoJos. As London fattens itself on the blood of Russian oligarchs and glittering glass erections thrust out of the 14th century plague pits it's reassuring to know that the heart of the city is all about tits, cocks and cum. Perversely it's the sleaze that's most honest these days, 200 years of libido baked into the filthy paving stones.
This means that sitting underground in Madame JoJos watching cabaret feels imperceptibly 'right'. You're participating (however subtly) in a human chain of debauchery stretching back to the Georgian era. As you sit surrounded by plush red velvet and gilt, art deco ornamentation you can practically sense the ghosts of gangsters, beatniks and showgirls swanning around you. Tonight the theme is 'guilty pleasures' and honestly, enjoying all this sticky, louche glamour is one of mine.
Cabaret Roulette is a regular fixture at JoJos: it's mission to bring democracy to vaudeville. The idea is that the audience chooses the theme for upcoming nights, suggesting them on their Facebook page and then picking one based on how much applause the concept gets in the club. Once it's been decided eight performers have two months to develop an act based on the theme. On the bill tonight are a nicely varied mixture of magic, music, and dance - all leavened with a decent dose of satire.
In charge of this whole shebang is Eva Von Schnippish, in character as a slightly warped randy Marlene Dietrich type. She makes the whole thing look effortless, which of course means that she's really good at her job. There's a cosy familiarity to this kind of patter, material that basically hearkens back to end-of-the-pier shows at then-glitzy seaside resorts and has its roots in the mythical Weimar cabaret.
An early highlight is Jeu Jeu La Foille. She brings on stage a bag-for-life from the Richmond branch of Whole Foods, an item that neatly encompasses a wide range of emotions: bourgeois foodie superiority, economic healthiness coupled with big box corporate hippyism. To the opening bars of Meat is Murder she pulls a Burger King Whopper out, guilt and pleasure fighting for control. Soon after there's a Gaga-esque meat dress (though disappointingly not actually made of meat), and the flourishing of a pork pie and bag of scratchings. Bleeding hunks of murdered meat and eroticism is a potent combination, and even though this is largely pro-meat it's at minimum promising to see the act of consuming flesh as a 'guilty' pleasure and not just a straightforward one.
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| Jeu Jeu La Foille |
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| Merlesque |
After some crazy/sexy jazz contortionism by the amazing Lily Raptor we move onto Merlesque. It's difficult to pin down exactly what's so erotically magnetic about a pair of murderous ukelele wielding half woman half fish girls - I began to suspect it was excavating some long-buried pre-adolescent yearnings for Ariel from The Little Mermaid. These suspicions were confirmed when they launched into a twisted cover of Part of My World mixed up with references to cut-throat capitalism and Karl Marx. Be still my beating heart!
Up next was puke-drinking and self-harm from Bigchief Randomchaos. This is a kind of gonzo clown act pitched somewhere between Rob Zombie and the Jim Rose Circus. The whole thing is shot through with freewheeling anarchism, skating on the thin ice between entertainment and disgust. Randomchaos is, if nothing else, charismatic - able to pinpoint the exact point between charm and obnoxiousness. As he lowers his bare ass onto a tray covered in drawing pins, all while assuring us that enjoying this would be his guilty pleasure if he felt guilty about it. As he stands up the pins tinkle to the floor and his ass crack burns an angry red. We'll take his word for that this is fun.
Following this was an intricate ballad about big cocks and Justin Bieber from Anna Lou Larkin and some booze-raddled magic by Miss Jones. After them was Alfie Ordinary, playing melancholy piano-led covers of Gina G's Ooh Ahh.. Just a Little Bit and Carly Rae Jepson's Call Me Maybe. With a persona pitched just the right side of drag, Alfie embodies the spirit of cabaret. This is a self-deprecating confessional - a bitingly morose romantic world of unrequited passions. He injects his pop with impossible longing - transforming mindless burbling lyrics into something honest and true.
Last on was Peggy De Lune performing a punk-tinged striptease to Die Antwoord's Cookie Thumper. She began in pink puffery, a squeaky caricature bimbo queen. More child than woman she fluffed around the stage burbling Betty Boopish drivel. But as soon as that killer bass beat kicked in all bets were off. Cookie Thumper, if you're not familiar with the song, is a machine-gun rap-rant by mean-ass mentalist Yolandi Vi$$er over pounding techno beats. The song has an electric rhythm running right through it, plugged right into De Lune's nervous system. The song gets more and more aggressively bananas as it goes on, as did the dance - culminating in a topless whirl of nipples and Capri-sun. It was a perfect capper to the evening - I'm not even sure what could have followed her.
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| Bigchief Randomchaos |
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| Alfie Ordinary |
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| Peggy De Lune |
The only thing that could have made this a more perfect Soho night was if I'd gotten mugged, puked down my shirt and woken up covered in glitter in a wheelie bin - but it was a worknight after all. Maybe on the weekend.
The next Cabaret Roulette is on 14th May - the theme: VILLAINY.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
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Beth B's Exposed: Beyond Burlesque totally demolishes the notion of burlesque as merely 'stripping that's acceptable in the middle classes'. The performers here spend their lives at the extreme end of the burlesque spectrum, their acts a heady cocktail of thrashed genitalia, fake blood and overt surrealism topped off with stiff middle fingers and a cheeky wink. But this isn't just shock for the sake of it, the film explores the compulsions that drive these performers on stage; digging deep under the makeup and glitter to find out why they do the things they do. This is fertile ground for a documentarian and Beth B is clearly on the same page as her subjects, all of whom are open, friendly and relaxed - feeling able to confide in her and by extension, us. Though the director is an invisible presence we're constantly aware of her, viewing this eccentric and alien world through the eyes of someone on the inside.
The performers showcased here neatly subvert expectations as to what burlesque 'should be': everyone here appears to have a clear manifesto as to what they'd like to achieve on stage. One of the most complex and illustrative is The World Famous *BoB*, who ran away from home to shack up with a crew of drag queens. Her aim was to become a drag queen herself, but paradoxically actually being born a woman is more problematic than you might think. To successfully pull off the drag aesthetic, *BoB* needed to become a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman; embodying a unique genderqueer ouroboros that you don't generally get to see in cinema.
*BoB* detonates a bomb under traditional notions of gender, as does Rose Wood, a transgender performance artist working at the extreme end of the spectrum, even for this documentary. Over the course of the production of the documentary we see her undergoing breast augmentation surgery. When we first meet her she has a taut body that echoes the mental and physical discipline of an expert martial artist. By the end of the film she has impressively bountiful breasts that somehow make her more physically intimidating, fiercely challenging anyone that interacts with her to confront her physical appearance.
Wood describes herself as "trans-aggressive", explaining that she's had to develop a tough carapace to put up with the daily bullshit of stares, catcalls and insults that come with a life lived as performance. She's open and charismatic in interview, imparting conspiratorial nuggets of inside drag-knowledge. This persona segues smoothly into her act which, in the most shocking footage of the film, involves a performance called Serial Killer in which she drags a woman into a bathtub, stabs her with lashes of fake blood, staples her scrotum into faux-labia and then staples a bloody rubber pussy onto her groin. Fun for all the family.
Suffusing the film is a soupy, gloopy mixture of greasepaint, blood and glitter - yet even through all this theatricality the humanity of the performers shines through. The most immediately affecting story is Mat Fraser, born a thalidomide baby with 'flipper' arms. He's a disabled rights activist, performing at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Paralympic Games and being lauded by the Queen herself. It's fun to think what Lizzie might make of his act, which showcases his disability in a beautifully concise manner - one segment featuring him shedding prosthetic arms and another showcasing upfront disabled sexuality.
Fraser could sustain an entire documentary by himself and the most affectingly honest moments in the film are the interviews where he charts his progression from being bullied at school and trying to conceal his disability, to his punk awakening and decision to embrace his body. We learn later that he's married the bombshell burlesque trash-queen Julie Atlas Muz whose performances (in particular one involved a severed hand) are both imaginative and technically marvellous. You get the warm fuzzies in tender pillow talk sequences as the couple are interviewed intertwined with each other, two people in perfect ease with each other - practically finishing each other's sentences.
Fraser dares us to stare, seizing the exploitative iconography of the PT Barnum freakshow and subverting it into a pro-disability statement of intent. Large portions of the documentary are shot in Coney Island, the warped wood, distorted paintings and downmarket carnie glamour creating an atmosphere similar to Tod Browning's Freaks - complete with the intense camaraderie that develops between people who exist physically and mentally on the fringes of what polite society deems 'acceptable'.
Exposed is consistently interesting, though much of this is borne on the backs of the performers rather than any particular impressive cinematic tricks. Though largely competently constructed there's the odd spot of editing that works against the film; a heartfelt explanation of the artistic joy and self-fulfilment of burlesque that immediately cuts to a woman dancing around in a lobster costume doing a buttery autocannibal striptease. This disconnect a funny, but arguably undermines a bit of the heartfelt sincerity.
Somewhat more egregious is the technical quality of the recordings. The performances are shot on handheld DV cams, so in the darkened rooms of the burlesque clubs the film quality grainy and indistinct. Similarly, the soundtrack occasionally devolves into slightly cheap sounding MIDI muzak - presumably where the budget couldn't accommodate royalties for whatever song was originally being played. Fortunately this DIY aesthetic just about fits the material, the technical shortcomings appropriately bringing to mind John Waters' Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.
For all these flaws, a film exploring a subculture this smart, charismatic and extroverted can't help but succeed, powering through any flaws with bravado: deploying shocking imagery in a pleasantly casual way - as if daring us to find this offensive. Anyone with a taste for sexual extremes, who enjoys being shocked and playfully transgressing all manner of taboos will enjoy this. For 71 minutes you find yourself hanging out with fascinating friends, awakening that old desire to poke boundaries previously thought unpokeable.
★★★★
Exposed: Beyond Burlesque is at the ICA from 7-16th January 2014. Tickets available here.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
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'Crazy Horse' hail from Paris, a city that trades on an image of decadence and luxury. So from the heady centre of one cultural metropolis to another. What usually takes place on the glamorous, tree-lined Avenue George V has been transplanted to a purpose built tent in a car park behind the National Theatre on the South Bank. Can Parisian glamour survive this journey?
There is a sudden shift in atmosphere that's quite surprising as you near the place. Initial thoughts are that the tent doesn't feel quite right, it's a weird facsimile, and reeks of artificiality. The floor is slightly soft underfoot, and gives ever so slightly as you walk on it. Decoration inside feels like you're in a low-rent and seedy version of the Big Brother house. Silvery, shiny plastic looking seats dot the floor, and similarly ever-so-slightly cheap chandeliers all add up to an atmosphere that's faintly brothel-like rather than the high class gentleman's club look they're presumably going for.
Things pick up a bit when you're in the stage area, which reminded me a lot of the Spiegeltent set up at the Wonderground this year. They share a similar Weimar Republic cabaret aesthetic, but again, the stage layout seems to leave a little to be desired here. In the Wonderground there was a projecting stage, and the audience was seated in the round, allowing us all to get a fairly close view of all the acts. Here, by design I'm seated pretty far away from everything that's going on, and very quickly I understand that the main difference between this and the burlesque cabaret acts that I've seen before is that the divide between audience and act is to be rigorously maintained.
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| Uh-huh. |
As the show begins, the curtain raises to reveal a line of girls in pastiche Queen's Guard uniforms. Big black furry hats, epaulettes and... not much else. Barebreasted they trot up and down the stage, stamping their feet to a military tattoo. I'm a bit surprised to see that they're topless right off the bat. My impression of this kind of thing is that they usually work up to this, and tease the crowd a bit. This back and forth between audience and performer is part of the reason why burlesque can make a convincing argument against the objectification of performers. But here we have 10 or so identical looking women moving in concert, any notion of individuality given up in service of the group. Ordinarily I'd be pretty enthusiastic about subverting militaristic parades with a dose of feminine sexuality, but this doesn't feel like its satirising anything. The women's faces are locked in doll-like blankness, running through the routine like puppets on strings.
The next few acts in the first half of the show all run in a similar vein. It feels like a checklist of cabaret cliches are being run through. This morass of tits n' arse begins to melt together, and in retrospect much of this half of the show seems like the same fembot clone doing similar dances under slightly different lighting to slightly different music. It's all impersonal, and more importantly it's extremely unsexy. The women on stage never acknowledge the audience, they may as well be performing to a brick wall. In previous cabaret shows of this nature the audience are repeatedly encouraged to cheer on the women, who seem responsive to the moods of the crowd. This enthusiasm is infectious, and goes a long way to dispelling any sense of sleaze in us. Whatever the reality of our relationship to the women on stage, we should feel like equals, and it should feel like the performer is enjoying themselves. Here though, the audience is as quiet as a funeral, and this silent, lascivious gaze begins to get to me.
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| When I say the women are used as canvases to project stuff onto I was being entirely literal. |
They may have vaseline smoothed smiles plastered onto their perfect faces but there is nothing behind them. Any vestige of individuality has been systematically scrubbed from these women, rendering them smooth, Barbie-like canvases for the stage manager to literally project whatever they want onto them. They even mime their way through the musical numbers, which only contributes to the strangely soulless atmosphere. I found myself wondering what all of this would look like without the backing track: a silent audience sipping their expensive wine, coolly watching naked women jerk arrhythmically, their mouths silently click-clacking open and shut like horror film ventriloquist's dummies.
One theme that seems to be developed in the second half is the utter abstraction of the female form. The projection that opens the second half is a gently undulating mountain range composed of arses. It shivers organically; perfect half moons gently shuddering under a breeze. It's about as erotic as an autopsy. The theme of the second half seems to be the sexual potential of inhumanity, something developed in the following acts.
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| Hot. |
A large mirror is placed on the stage, and behind it the performers contort themselves so as to place different body parts just above it. The impression we get when they raise their arm is a hovering, mirrored hand floating in the centre of the stage like something from a deep sea exploration film. This almost feels like an attack on common notions of what is hot, and what is not. Now we're seeing an arm floating like a jellyfish, or an arse perfectly mirrored in the stagelights, looking inescapably alien and unhuman. Are there people here getting off to this grotesque distortion of sexuality? Is there a new fetish in town for the twisted abstraction of femininity? Do people really get off to monsters composed of infinite mirrored breasts, or a severed leg floating in an inky black pool?
As I see it there are two possibly interpretations of this show. The first is that 'Forever Crazy' is a vicious condemnation of its audience. It'd be correct in identifying this kind of cabaret as a way to leer at women under the pretext of culture, a socially acceptable way to pay to see some tits. Having accepted that this is what its audience wants, it takes the same stance as a furious parent catching their child with a pack of cigarettes. "You're going to smoke the whole pack right here in front of me." 'Forever Crazy' is saying "You want tits and arse, fine - here's all the tits and arse you could ever want, but transmuted into the nightmarish by our grinning, sterilised automaton-dolls." Anyone that would genuinely get off to this kind of thing strays into the realm of the serial killer or the sexual psychopath.
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| This reminds me of Silent Hill. |
The second (and the far more disturbing) interpretation is that this is what people find sexy. An audience genuinely doesn't want to see humanity on stage. The notion of empathy with the person rubbing their arse on stage for your pleasure is something that people are actively repelled from. The cold, the impersonal and the inhuman is what they crave. They would rather consider the erotic potential of the arse in absentia of the person it's attached to. I imagine the people that enjoy this sort of show gazing longingly into a butcher's window, blushing as they furtively hide their erections.
There was one brief moment of humanity in the middle of this sea of despair, something that felt transplanted in from an entirely different show. 'Nu-percussionists' Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding perform a back and forth table drumming session, complete with masses of cocaine, two black eyes and bottles of champagne. It's great stuff, but it's an all-too-brief reminder of what's missing from the rest of the show. This little window of personality, humour and energy only under-lines the sheer soullessness and of the rest of the performance.
They're soon replaced though, the stage filling with glassy-eyed mannequins once more, women distinguished from each other only by the colour of the wig they're wearing. In a cruel twist they flash their names up, but we have no idea who is who. Ordinarily we'd be applauding each performer, as their name flashes up, but there's no context, and the audience sits in uncomfortable silence as if trying to process what we've seen.
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| Sexy abstract times. |
The name 'Forever Crazy' sounds like a light-hearted bit of fun and the notion of a little space in the universe where it's always cabaret time is appealing. But lets strip it back a bit. This thing is crazy indeed, but it's crazy in a psychopathically antihuman way, and it will never, ever end. If you want to picture the show, imagine a high-heeled shoe stamping on a woman's face - forever.
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| Stamp. Stamp. Stamp. |
'Forever Crazy' is on the South Bank until the 16th of December. God I wish it wasn't.
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