Monday, January 12, 2015
'SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque' at the Electric Ballroom, 10th January 2014
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.
 |
| 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.
 |
| 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.
 |
| 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.
Tags:
burlesque ,
dance ,
electric ballroom ,
Suicide girls ,
SuicideGirls ,
theatre
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 Responses to “'SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque' at the Electric Ballroom, 10th January 2014”
Post a Comment