Written by Penny Starr Jr.
I’ve had the pleasure of being an instructor several times at BurlyCon, as well as an attendee. You get on the plane to BurlyCon and you look at the class guide, mostly to block off your own classes—what do you need to prepare, where do need to go, how much time do you have between teaching gigs—and then you see it. That class that you yourself would take. And you circle it. And you circle another. And another. And then you curse under your breath—you’re teaching during another class you want to take. Damn!
And that’s just it—we never stop learning. Burlesque is a collection of many arts: theater, acting, dance, movement, staging, direction, lighting, sound and music, costuming, make-up, hair, small business management… to name a few. The closest you can come to that kind of education is to enroll in the theater department of a college. Or do what many of us early professional burlesquers did and collect learning experiences at every turn. Dance classes here. Sewing classes there. Take a pro out for coffee to “pick their brain.” Some experiences were trial by fire. (Oh, red party [lighting] gels, you make my beautiful costume look only red on stage!)
But now, thanks to the mettle of Miss Indigo Blue, we have BurlyCon! One stop shopping for all the burlesque arts and business. Taught by burlesquers, for burlesquers.
But that’s just the elevator pitch. There’s more magic than that: and it’s the people. There is a reason we refer to ourselves as a community. Because we are one. Maybe it’s because our roots trace back—what?—one generation? Our oldest dancers, not legends, but neo-buresquers, are in their early 50s. Our youngest dancers are in their twenties. From a timeline perspective, we’re talking from 1995 (at the earliest), and the hundred or so performers collected at Exotic World or that first Tease-O-Rama in 2001, to twenty years total of this thing called neo-burlesque. All these people descend to celebrate the art. And with no competition. No shows. Just classes. And parties. A place to still peacock without the pressure of performance.
To this day, I still think about Waxie Moon’s class on spatial relationships and staging. I think about how even though I teach costuming, I still learned new techniques taking Amber Ray’s class. That Rosie Bitts taught sponsorship from the tub! Or during Gin Minsky’s 1920s style dance class, the way people just fell to the sidelines exhausted. And I could kiss Lola Love on the mouth for her invaluable class on merkins! Now they’re all I want to wear!
Some of my favorite moments were not necessarily in the classroom, either. My last BurlyCon, I was bunking with Vivianne VaVoom and Burgundy Brixx. We were all between classes and in that limbo where you’ve already taught or taken three classes, but still haven’t had lunch and are trying to process all you’ve learned and then had too much coffee and never enough water, and someone turned on the TV to the horror movie MAMA. We weren’t paying attention… until we were! We were sucked in and screaming like girls. We pried ourselves out of the room to go back to classes.
Or the year I decided to vend as well as teach. My wrangler was Miss Kitty Baby. To my right, the table was being manned by a new boylesquer, Eddie Van Glam. To my left, was a woman who had taken classes, but was really into concocting make-up, soon to be Dr. Jen from Atomic Cosmetics. I consider these people to be some of the finest on this planet Earth.
But I think my favorite memory is of the first BurlyCon. I came to co-teach with Venus deMille. It was the weekend before my wedding. “What are you doing here?!” everyone asked. “What am I going to do there?!” I replied, “Everything has been ordered!” And we were gifted with a new president. And in celebration, Sinner Saint Burlesque hosted a session of hospitality with fried chicken and champagne called the “Yes We Did!” dinner. And we ate chicken and drank bubbles and looked forward in hope. In hope for our new president. But also, as with all BurlyCons, with hope for what our art form can achieve. And all these faces, new and old, hungry to learn.