Danielle Colby Striptease Historian | The Queen of Rust

Race and Burlesque: The curious case of the performer of colour.

Added 2019-12-29 19:35:48 +0000 UTC

Race and Burlesque: The curious case of the performer of colour, by Chocolat The Extraordinaire.

It was around 2003 that I started going to Lady Luck Club, an underground nightclub playing vintage rhythm’n’ blues in a dark basement in central London.

It was the first time I’d ever seen burlesque dancers on stage and I was mesmerised; I watched them gyrate and flirt and pose, and I knew for certain that I wanted to do what they were doing and I had every confidence that I could. It was only when I got home and started obsessively looking for more information on how I could become one of those girls that I realised none of them looked like me. In all honesty, the fact that I’d be the only black girl doing it delighted me – I was only eighteen and I was perhaps a bit arrogant; I felt special. I swallowed any moment of intimidation I felt and shimmied on. In fact, I used this as my fuel to succeed.

The only other non-white face I could find already performing burlesque in the UK was the awe-inspiring Fancy Chance, and after a few months of performing I met and became fast friends with a ball of burlesque energy called Marianne Cheesecake. So, out of a scene of about maybe fifty girls working regularly, there were three of us who weren’t white. Over the next few years, two or three more girls of colour started performing, but they were few and far between and I became more and more disillusioned; it saddened me. I kept on waiting for a big racial boom; I kept thinking, ‘any minute now a whole load of black girls are going to flood in.’ But it just didn’t happen.

(READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT 21st Century Burlesque Magazine)