“This moment is the culmination of my striptease, the payoff. I want the punters to be thinking about sex-and I want them to think I’m thinking about it too.”
Dita Von Teese, Fetish and the Art of the Teese p.3
Part of creating your Burlesque persona is inventing a suitable name for your new character. Dita Von Teese, Gypsy Rose Lee are just two and they conjure up the world of sex, exhibitionism and desire. The burlesque dancer is an actress as well as a stripper. She flitters between innocence and cheek. If you turn your attention to their face and you see the typical cheesecake expressions, you will be taught, ‘the wink,’ the ‘oooh,’ ‘shocked’ and pout. It is all about being alive in your own act and commenting on your state of undressed with your body. With your eyes you are saying, “I shouldn’t, (shock) but I have (wink) and…oops more is about to come off. (pout.) Cue sultry music as another stocking is slowly pulled off.
Desire is a normal human emotion that we are supposed to keep hidden. Modern advertising plays on our needs to fulfil the ache within us to be naughty, and to submit. Everywhere you look we are being told that giving in is the route to happiness. After all ‘they won’t tell if you won’t tell, so go ahead gorge on this box of chocolates.’ The problem is there are always consequences to our actions in the real world. There are perhaps less actions considered as taboo in this world, but we can’t talk about them. Burlesque is all about desire and wanting. It’s about an audience wanting to see a women undressed and a dancer who wants to please. In the outside world this is unacceptable because as human beings we are meant to control our most base desires. So we lock them up in a uniform, go to work and never reveal this side. Burlesque dancers reveal the side but it is under a name and a character.
The purpose of creating a character could be because revealing our own desires is traumatising even to ourselves. So we do it behind a mask, something some dancers incorporate into their dances. Part of this desire is to be looked at because girls are trained to be aroused by someone else’s reaction to them. The best example of this type of thinking is American Beauty, a film where the character Angela main desire is to have men look at her. She wants to be the most beautiful and alluring female in any situation. We eventually learn that this is all a façade for her true feelings. She does say;
“ If people I don’t even know look at me and want to f*** me, it means I really have a shot at being a model.”
American Beauty
Admitting to these feelings and sharing the need to be desired will change the way people see you. This makes me wonder how the dancer is seen in everyday life. She may put away her mask and fan at the end of the show but will she still wear it in the eyes of others. Is this the reason for the character and name? Mainstream media would have you believe that female sexuality is non-existence.
“Leopold von Sacher-Masoch put it this way: ‘Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage.”
Dita Von Teese, Fetish and the Art of the Teese p. 101
In a world where the female body is easier to access through online p*rn and lad’s mags it’s strange to see burlesque make a comeback. Perhaps the appeal is the boundaries the dancer puts up before tearing down. It could be that we are more restricted then we liked to believe. Dita Von Teese always admits that she is a stripper and enjoys male attention. She is an icon of Neo Burlesque but these views seem to clash with the empowerment message amateurs are being offered. Most of the time you wear a costume to create a character. In Burlesque it is revealing what is beneath your costume that creates the character. Maybe the final reveal is about your true character rather than hiding behind a persona.
