This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Spectacles of Agency and Desire: Dance Histories and the Burlesque Stage

Pauline Markham

This page is referenced by:

The Performance of Masculinity Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes: Ada Harland, Lisa Weber, Grace Logan, Pauline Markham and Aggie Wood were all (with the exception of Markham), cross dressed in their performance of Ixion (their first performance in the US) which premiered September of 1868 at Wood’s Broadway Theatre in New York. During their act, Elizabeth Mullenix notes, “Thompson and her Blondes would parody honorable and dishonorable male contemporaries, adopt their language and their gestures, and sing songs and dance in imitation of well-known artists—all of which was standard fare for the burlesque” (379). The key words here are parody and imitation. These performers were not just playing out the stories of men, they were playing out stories as men. Which is a crucial distinction to make as it directly relates to the saliency of their performance. Men who attended the performance could not brush off the idea that they were being made fun of, and were thus very affected by the performance. Mullenix continues, “burlesque actresses' performance of male characters focused not upon conveying the illusion of masculinity or telling a man's story but instead foregrounded the construction of masculinity or of the masculine fable—an act which was obviously so threatening to hegemonic forces that it was eventually forbidden in mainstream theatres” (379-80). The subtext of the breeches role is that women could "wear the breeches" in other areas of life too. Thompsonian burlesque was threatening because it made the subtext into text by showing that women could play men just as well as men (Mullenix 379-80). This realization pulled the rug out from under the way both women and men conceived of masculinity.

The bodies of these performers, women in breeches, were sites of paradox. The sexualized areas of the bust, waist and thighs were accentuated in the costumes, but they were coupled with the attitudes and gestures of manhood (Mullenix). These gestures of manhood were often extreme: “In the upside-down world of burlesque…[the] performer was licensed to act in a very unladylike fashion: she swaggered about the stage wearing short pants, played the banjo, danced the jig, commanded battalions of her fellows in close-order drill” (Allen 148). The female burlesquer was given a space to swagger, to exaggerate the speech and stance of men. This performance was first met with open arms and sensationalized, drawing large crowds for months on end, but then, because burlesque could not be reconciled with preceding melodramatic ideologies these performers were eventually removed from the mainstream bourgeoisie theatres. This act of pushing burlesque out contributed to the development of the emerging image of the burlesquer as a dangerously sexual low other, a character unwanted and unsupported in mainstream culture (Mullenix 376). History dealt with the paradox of women’s bodies in breeches by sweeping them to the side and then further sexualizing and de-masculinizing them. By the 1920s burlesque was synonymous with stripping—having lost the employment of masculine costumes, and gained a significant level of promiscuity.
The Liminal Space of Burlesque The term “liminal” has been used by burlesque scholars to talk about burlesque in too many instances for me to discount it. It is important because it hits on the marginality that is associated with the form, as well as the tone of ambiguity that often accompanies burlesque discourse. With the arrival of Lydia Thompson to New York in 1868 the upside-down, transitional world of burlesque was brought to mainstream American audiences. Robert Allen describes how, “The first season of modern burlesque in America was disturbing—and threatening—because it presented a world without limits, a world turned upside down and inside out in which nothing was above being brought down to earth. In that world, things that should be kept separate were united in grotesque hybrids (Allen 28-9). The majority of the performers of these monstrosities were women, which was what made Thompsonian burlesque so transgressive and fascinating, “it combined visual elements of feminine spectacle with the impertinence and inversiveness of the burlesque form—a merger effected on stage almost entirely by women and expressed through their bodies, language, movements, and gestures” (Allen 379). In the burlesque environment of “anything-goes,” there were always twists that the audience did not anticipate which contributed to a feeling of becoming. The performance was creating itself as it went, an attribute that aligns with the definition of “liminality.”

Allen offers this definition after recognizing a correspondence between theatrical space and the liminal space of tribal rituals described by anthropologist Victor Turner “Liminality confers a license to be different, a difference that would be unallowable in ‘everyday’ life” (37). This license is present in the burlesque performance, where performers create their own acts as they wish and incorporate as much inversion as they want. In the case of Lydia Thompson, the costuming was radical, when juxtaposed against the norm of the day.

Neo-Burlesque stars are embracing this license and incorporating inversive material into their acts. Neo-Burlesque duet partners Lola Frost and Rita Star call attention to the social construction of gender with their costumes, make allusions to lesbianism, as well as dance and act. This conglomeration feels distinctly liminal but also wholly burlesque.
Works Cited:
Allen, Robert Clyde. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Print.