Playing In The Garden

One of the best burlesque tricks is to find one thing to focus on during your striptease.

We often get so overwhelmed with having so many pieces of clothing to remove that sometimes we get a little lost in our strip. Focusing on one item through the entire performance can help us to understand the concept of creating a theme and sticking with it.

Now, as you grow as a burlesque performer, you don’t need to focus on just one item during your entire routine but for my beginner students, it’s helpful to focus on one thing because the mind is an avalanche of thoughts, it helps organize our thinking enough to create a thematic product.

Within Burlesque and striptease a theme helps engage your audience.

As I’m reading more about the combat zone of Boston in the mid-1970s I’m realizing that the performers would not regularly get tips from their customers. Sometimes if the customer is feeling generous or asking for extra services (lap dance or private dance) they would give a tip or extra payment of some sort but generally tipping was not expected during a striptease or burlesque routine.

If a customer is looking for a private dance, it’s expected that they pay extra anyhow, that would not be registered as a tip that would be considered extra work for extra dollars, equal trade.

It was important for a dancer to have a gimmick in her routine. Some thing for the audience to focus on to keep asses in seats.

Many of the routines in the mid-1970s in the combat zone or 20 minute routines. A performer would stay on the stage for a full 20 minutes and encourage customers to keep drinking specifically with her. A gimmick helps.

The idea is that after their performance is done, the dancer is so inviting that there are a line of patrons looking to spend time with that performer in the club drinking champagne and having fun. Only if that dancer sold drinks at an inflated price would they get extra money. The bar would take a five dollar drink and sell it for seven dollars, one dollar of each drink would go to the dancer, one dollar would go to the bar tender, five to the bar. So it really paid for a dancer to keep the patrons drinking. This was in large part how dancers would make tips.

For $100 a patron could get a bottle of champagne and the dancers full attention until the bottle is empty, sometimes that would be private attention in a private room, sometimes that would be public attention at the bar. It really just depends on the dancer, city, establishment and era.

When I’m teaching and performing I like to pay homage to the past. Or at least to the parts of the past that celebrated moments of autonomy and a sense of freedom on stage. And a part of that autonomy and freedom on stage is a dancers ability to express themselves.

Dancers Who are proficient with fan dancing, big fluffy boas, Or a telephone, yes I have watched a dancer pleasure themselves with a telephone. It was actually quite interesting.... whatever your gimmick is, that’s your invitation to incorporate your personality, dreams, imagination, politics, religion, your story, into a routine and invite your patron into the world you have created on that stage. And the best way to do that is with a gimmick. That’s how fan dancing was started. It was a gimmick to keep patrons in the establishment and an opportunity for a dancer to become a headliner. Only the dancers with the most beautiful costumes and props became headliners.

Essentially what you’re watching right now is a very simple gimmick much like fan dancing but with a palm frond.

I often do this routine with an ostrich feather but I thought with all the greenery, a palm frond would make more sense.

I play with depth of field With the camera since my audience is now mostly digital it’s another way to invite people into my fantasy, to create depth and texture and give my audience more of an intimate experience.

Enjoy!

Video link here: https://vimeo.com/530371873/ee90c7b9b6