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

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 unites 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 are always twists that the audience did not anticipate which may contribute 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, whose use of costuming was radical for her time, when juxtaposed against the norm of the day. 
 

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