This ain’t your grandaddy’s burlesque show! If grandpa went to a neo-burlesque show, such as “BadAss Burlesque” at Arlene’s Grocery on Halloween of 2009, his jaw would drop. Onstage, a tranny named Rose Wood, equipped with both breasts and a penis, pretends to overdose onstage and a woman dressed as a mummy, Deity, unravels bandages as her version of a classic striptease.

Sally Rand: Classic Burlesque Royalty

Golden Age burlesque from the 1930s-1950s,was considered a low-brow art form performed by women and mainly viewed and produced by men. Each performer’s act lasted the length of a song and seamlessly blended vaudevillian humor and sexuality, ultimately ending in a striptease and reveal of a nearly naked female body onstage. Burlesque “died” at the end of the 1950s, with the birth of strip club striptease. But as in fairy tales, sleeping beauties often wake up.

In the mid-90s, that beauty clad in pasties with a martini in her hand began to stir. In neo-burlesque, the core of the performance is still the mixture of the sexualized body- as inevitably the performer will strip- and humor. However, neo-burlesque is often about exploring political and social issues and putting all sorts of different bodies and representations of beauty onstage, including those that are not deemed “sexy” in mainstream America.

Professor Dr. Lynn Sally teaches “The History of Burlesque” in the Drama Department of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is also a performer who goes by the stage name of Dr. Lucky with a MySpace tagline, “The World’s Finest Burlesque PhDD.” Dr. Sally believes subverting what is considered the traditionally distasteful body in society and treating it as something worth watching and beautiful is part of the allure of neo-burlesque. “It’s always monster/beauty in neo-burlesque,” she says, “You’re a monster to the rest of the world; it’s going against ways you’re supposed to conduct yourself in the public sphere” by exposing the body. Read the rest of this entry »