ARTS HUB AUSTRALIA — Moira Finucane has been performing burlesques macabre for over ten years now – creating, with collaborator Jackie Smith, intimate theatrical spectacles where variety, fairy tale, cabaret, the gothic, and burlesque are melded into indelible visions of gender, power, violence and desire.
Finucane and Smith’s work in this provocative and rich area has been presented in major festivals, cabarets, clubs and theatres around the world. Their burlesques have nearly caused a riot in a London club, have brought the house down from Edinburgh to Sweden, from the Opera House to Tokyo, from Brighton to Brisbane to Brixton and beyond. They have been gaped at Australia’s National Gallery, been gossiped about by Hong Kong taxi drivers, been wildly souvenired by Scottish fans, and forced critics to declare “you’ll never look at food in quite the same way”. They have been the subject of university lectures, cultural conniptions, doctoral dissertations and audience acclaim.
Their full length show The Burlesque Hour – described by Finucane and Smith as a “revolution in a chocolate box” – has taken Australia’s most astonishing and edgy performance around femininity and sexuality and packaged it in an accessible, sophisticated and cutting edge salon, where it has been embraced by contemporary theatregoing audiences, mainstream audiences, queer audiences and audiences that don’t usually attend theatre.
The Burlesque Hour features Moira Finucane, the queen of cabaret bizarre; Moscow circus-trained circus and burlesque star Azaria Universe; Japanese shock cabaret artiste Yumi Umiumare – from Japan’s seminal butoh company DaiRakudakan, a wild-cat amongst the pigeons. Every season features luminous guest artistes, including – to date – the legendary Australian variety star an original Tivoli dame, Toni Lamond; iconic gender-in-performance artist Maude Davey; British live artist and cult cabaret legend Ursula Martinez, and the all-dancing, all-dangerous nunchaku go-go girls The Town Bikes.
Selling out to standing ovations and critical acclaim at the Sydney Opera House, in three seasons in Melbourne; and multiple sell out seasons in Adelaide; and in its first international tour, in Edinburgh 2005, under the velvet canopy of the 1930’s Belgian Mirror Tent La Gayola – The Burlesque Hour was hailed as “the hottest temptation of the festival” (Scotland on Sunday). In less than three years, The Burlesque Hour has been seen by over 17,000 people.
In June and July 2007, Finucane and Smith return to Melbourne to present Burlesque Hour MORE! A return of favorite acts from the original, as well as a cracking mixture of new acts and guest stars.
Moira Finucane from Finucane and Smith reflects on burlesque, its meaning, and its potential to stir the cultural pot…
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Burlesque! A Little Insight
The word burlesque first started its life in the 1600s – meaning a mockery, a parody, a grotesquery or exaggeration. There were burlesque operas called burlettas, there was burlesque fiction; a pompous and overblown insight into the vanities and conceits of daily life. Nowadays when we think of burlesque, we often think of tassles n tease, but there is an extraordinary history that weaves women’s performance of both their femininity and their sexuality and sensuality together with a sense of agency, of subversion, of cheek and sass – it’s memorable, funny, sometimes extremely transgressive, and often much more powerful than you might imagine.
A Walk Down Memory Lane…
Where else but in the variety world of music hall, vaudeville and burlesque of the past could an audience in one evening thrill to a circus act, marvel at the performing dogs, laugh at the comics, blush at the scantily clad show girls, and be brought to tears by the delivery of a classic monologue by an Actress in the “front of curtain piece”. And the punters would queue around the block for it.
Burlesque itself has a much more saucy and some would say sleazy reputation than the other forms of variety. It often featured strippers and carnival side show performers. For many performers wanting to get into the alluring world of showbiz, burlesque was the bottom rung. But for others, female performers in particular, who were interested in performing and exploring something outside of the prescribed strict social mores, burlesque was an opportunity to work, create, and pursue their ambitions to make entertainment. While only a few managed to break out into the mainstream, the most famous probably being stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, burlesque became a haven for alternative, often transgressive performance. This doesn’t mean it was all peaches and cream for the performers, dancers and show girls of the burlesque halls. Mostly, it was a damned hard slog, with the moral majority looking down in judgment at the wickedness of chorus girls and strippers, and the audience members being mostly male, and not necessarily there for the art.
Female artists using a burlesque sensibility – the mock, the parodic, the grotesque, and the exaggerated – overlaid their presentations of alluring sexuality with wry wit and a razor edged intelligence that we still remember and admire today. The likes of Mae West, who came to embody a kind of mature, knowing and very risqué sexuality in her forties, Marlene Dietrich who caused a sensation with her cross dressing and her ambiguous allure, Marie Lloyd, queen of the music halls in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the English cross dresser Vesta Tilley, loved by all the gentlemen and the ladies, and our recent stars with their showgirl sensibilities stuffed firmly in their cheek like Dolly Parton – who famously said in response to an interviewer asking her what she thought about people calling her a dumb blonde, “I ain’t dumb and I ain’t blonde either”.
The fantastic form of variety still has so much to offer – and in the contemporary context of The Burlesque Hour, images of female and femininity in particular are now owned by the female performers themselves. They can still be transgressive, subversive, satirical, alluring, intellectual, funny, outrageous, political, dangerous or just plain silly – the beauty of burlesque is you can take your pick which. It is, as they say in the classics, something for everyone and drinks at the bar!
The Contemporary Context
Jackie and I have seen burlesques or all shapes and sizes around the world, and yes, it is the first world that we are talking about here… more on that below. And whilst they occasionally walk away with that strange taste so undeniably associated with a “hmmm that tastes like exploitation to me”, most often what they see are women, mostly young women, but certainly not exclusively so, experimenting with their own sense of themselves their own power, their sexuality, their sense of what it is to be a woman, and their freedom.
What’s the connection? How are sexuality and freedom so interconnected for women, and why in societies where women are already “free” and “liberated” is burlesque having such a major boom.
We live in conservative times and, despite the successful work of many women and men to promote equality, the oppression of women is still a reality, even in our “enlightened west”. In Australia alone one in three women have experienced violence or the serious threat on violence in their adult lives. One quarter of young people have witnessed physical abuse against their mother or step-mother. One in five Australian woman have been sexually assaulted, and women are ten times more likely than men to be so.
Women are still struggling to gain control over their own bodies and the expression of their sexuality and sexual identity. There is a very real connection between the high levels of violence and sexual violence against women and girl children, and how women’s physical and sexual rights and presence are viewed on the streets every day and every night.
What’s that got to do with risqué performance around women’s sexuality? Everything. From civil rights to anti-racism, from class critiques to activism around gay and lesbian rights – wherever people cannot pursue happiness, love and the expression of sexuality without being punished they jack up, they protest, and often they find witty ways of doing it – from Pride and Prejudice to Pride Marches, people that want liberation, for themselves and for others, are going to find interesting and often thrilling ways to express it.
Burlesque can be powerful stuff, and is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. It doesn’t necessarily all make for good theatre; as with all cultural phenomena, there is the good the bad and the ugly out there. But because women’s physical safety is still connected to their sexuality and their expression of their own sexuality, we see women’s performance of burlesque – at its core – as part of a continuing exploration of sexuality and liberation.
New burlesque and the burlesque hour
Burlesque is now a much bigger arena than what is often associated with it – it encompasses many artforms and styles. The new burlesque as it’s called often harks back to a retro American burlesque feel – it’s 40-50s fishnets and corsets, tassels n tease, and some of it’s absolutely gorgeous.
The Burlesque Hour owes little to that American retro feel, it is a very different beast.
The Burlesque Hour emerged out of over a decade’s work in the area of gender and sexuality in performance and Finucane & Smith’s exposure to contemporary burlesque, variety, vaudeville and cabaret around Australia and internationally. Much of this work sits in queer, underground or very specific performance arts contexts and has had little exposure to any mainstream or even mainstream contemporary performance audiences. The vision for The Burlesque Hour was to create a gorgeous, respectful and accessible salon context within which these works could be seen and appreciated by all kinds of audiences – mainstream, cutting edge, straight, gay, young old, theatre goers and non theatre goers – for the exciting cutting edge, liberating and thrilling qualities that they have. Finucane and Smith’s work prioritises the audience, it is our very firm belief that audiences are by and large intelligent and open; if they are taken care of and treasured you can take them anywhere. It is part of our political mission not to keep “cutting edge” in the cutting edge or underground forums but to bring them to as broad an audience as possible. Everyone, we believe, should be able to see and enjoy work that is liberating, confronting, exciting provocative, challenging; not just a select few.
The concept of The Burlesque Hour is a salon showcase of some of Australia’s hottest exponents of gender in performance and contemporary burlesque. Set in a salubrious salon environment, The Burlesque Hour engulfs its audience in a sensibility that is pure old-fashioned burlesque/variety/music hall. On this historical base, The Burlesque Hour layers provocative, exciting works that shift the debate about gender, femininity and sexuality, and include works rarely seen by any mainstream or even contemporary performance audiences.
The Burlesque Hour represents a coming together and a celebration of performance innovation, and the cultures that have encouraged it. It reflects queer performance culture; women’s performance culture – from The Women’s Season at Melbourne Fringe to Drag Kings (women’s cross dressing performance night) and queer club performance nights such as Libido Unbound and cLUB bENT; and contemporary arts culture. It is a work that has its genesis in the queer and fringe theatre cultures of Australia, both of which are artistically and politically vibrant.
The Burlesque Hour is unique – it pecks the eyes out of such a wild and eclectic vein of influences, ranging from traditional Japanese dance, to Victorian melodrama, to punk performance art, to old style carnival, side show and freak show, and melds them into contemporary visions of gender, violence, power and desire. It’s an explosive mix of vaudeville, carnival, showgirl, magic realism, music hall, the gothic, dance, Japanese butoh and performance art – it’s old style, but wildly contemporary, it twists the artform until it screams for more.
BURLESQUE HOUR MORE! Dates: Thursday 21st June – Sunday 15th July 2007. Wednesday to Sunday – 4 weeks only!
Times: Wednesday & Thursday 8pm. Friday & Sat 7pm and 9.30pm. Sunday 7pm.
Where: fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Bookings: 03 9662 9966 OR tickets@fortyfivedownstairs.com (table bookings available)
Bravissima! (featuring Moira Finucane and The Burlesque Hour) Dates: Wednesday 13th June – Saturday 16th June.
Times:Wednesday 13th June 9:15 pm, Thursday 14th June 7 pm, Thursday 14th June – Saturday 16th June 9:15 pm.
Where: Space (Adelaide Cabaret Festival)
Cost: $36 Conc $32
Note: Wed 13, Fri 15, Sat 16 June shows sold out. Limited $18 student tix available Thursday 14th June show only.
For more information or to buy tickets, CLICK HERE.
