Judy Confronts the Audience

Go on, laugh, get your money’s worth. No one’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? We know it’d the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So you can go home when the show’s over, strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you. I’m sure they see through you just like we do!^[1]

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[1] Judy’s direct address to the audience in Dorothy Arzner’s (1940) Dance, Girl, Dance [film], RKO Radio Pictures. 

Watching the Vegas Showgirl

Whilst in Vegas I watched the following shows; Crazy Girls, X-Burlesque and Vegas The Show!  The first two were small scale revues.  Crazy Girls (http://www.lasvegas-nv.com/crazy-girls.htm) featured a variety of female dancers, some with excellent training and performance-personality, whilst others who seemed to specialise in their boob job.  I was unfortunate enough to get a front-row seat, which meant that I felt like my gaze was on view to the audience, and the dancers, I became self-conscious.  Wonderful dancing meant I could get over myself, but a large foam penis-prop used to sit on in one number made me so unbelively embarrased and made the whole show tacky, rather than knowingly tacky in a guilty pleasure way. However, the show was fun overall.  


X-Burlesque was a lack-lustre amateur job, nothing burlesque about it (http://shop.vegas.com/shows/showtimes2.jsp?show=1007#show_review).  Totally unworthy of the word burlesque.  The dancers were standard, with little charisma, and the numbers felt they owed much to the R'n' B video genre - if only they could be competently danced.  Pretty darned awful.


Vegas The Show! (http://www.vegastheshow.com/) proved even Vegas can have moments of self-reflexivity, and this large-scale musical looked back on the past glories of the town and quite incredibly, paid tribute to Sammy Davis Jr who had to fight incredible overt racism in order to enter through the front door at a venue in which he was top-billing.  A wonderful old-style revue to put a spring in my step.

Special Collections Archive UNLV

Went to University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) special collection to meet the women who started the oral history archive there, and read some of their transcripts http://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/) .  The testimonies of the various Las Vegas showgirls were amazing, and addressed such wide issues from technique, upbringing, travel and visa arrangements, racism in Vegas etc.  They make for amazing reads and I managed to photocopy some of the best.  This made me wonder about using appropriated interviews too.  I’m not sure I have to be the interviewer, I’m just really interested in the voice of the showgirl.  It still doesn’t quite answer the question of what I will do with the interview material, but it got me thinking about it.

Watching the Parisien Showgirl

I saw the show at the Lido (http://www.lido.fr/us/cabaret-paris.html) and had great fun.  It was so camp its indescribable.  They feature showboys in their show as well as showgirls, and I have to say they just made me cringe (I’m cringing so much I cannot bring myself to type a description of their worst costume).  A featured act was a male acrobat who performed on two long bits of material.  He was incredibly strong and flexible and his costume was a small pair of white shorts.  I was interested to think about this.  Through the use of his body, he displayed both a masculinity (strength) and femininity (fluidity in his movements and flexibility), this routed his performance outside of camp, somehow and located him in some sort of more serious object-of-desire place, in a way that the showgirls operate.  The showboys, on the other hand, are total camp, in a way that sort of negates their skill and makes them look like a Butlins act.  They are not any sort of object of desire, they are, as far as I could tell, a tacky joke.  Of course, I have no access to the spectrum of responses that a gay male spectator might have, and who knows, perhaps they function as an object of desire for them.  My point is, for me, showboys, no.  (From other performance instances I can say, male showgirls, yes).

Watching Crazy Horse (http://www.lecrazyhorseparis.com/) I lost my visual innocence.  The cabaret featured a troupe of female dancers, who performed butt-naked except for a very small strip of what looked like black gaffer tape, strategically placed. Although there was an audience roughly evenly split between men and women, I felt transgressive watching it, as though the whole spectacle was directed towards a male spectator and not me.  It was by far the most knowing caberet-revue I have seen.  It reputedly crosses over with burlesque as earlier this year Dita Von Teese was their featured artist.  However, I think this says more about Dita’s hetero-normative position within burlesque that she can cross over into more overt stripping contexts, rather than Crazy Horse’s closeness to burlesque. 

I felt that the show did a number of things in terms of styling and choreography that took the whole thing far closer to a gentlemen's club dance context.  For example, the lighting and choreography dissected the bodies so that we saw perhaps, only legs performing.  I found the amount that we did not see the faces of the performers quite shocking.  There was no opportunity for the performers to ‘send-up’ the performance with their faces in darkness or out of view.  I found this the hardest aspect to handle.  I also felt that the repetitive use of the arched-back position that pushes the bum out moved the performances away from mainstream theatrical dance technique (which is often clearly visible in burlesque performances and particularly at the Lido) and more towards of gentleman’s club stripping.  I realised watching the Crazy Horse that I actually need to watch strip shows featuring lap and pole dancing so that I can write about the gaps and overlaps between the different styles of performing I’m interested in.  The show also featured some numbers that felt really disturbing and uncomfortable, for example a solo performance with a dancer who commenced her number tied up in ropes, and then used the ropes as props to perform on.  It’s S&M references felt shallow and quite frankly, anti-women.

The featured act was a male tap duo, which came as a blessed relief.  Fully clothed, the two were fully spot-lit, used their faces, audience interaction, humour and a number of different tap dancing ‘quotes’ to create an entertaining number.  And then we had to return to the strobe-lit naked women.  It was like our one moment of fun.  The seriousness of the naked women was alienating, I longed to see some smiling faces!

Glamour Etymology

“The word glamour (magic charm, alluring beauty or charm, a spell affecting the eye, a kind of haze in the air) comes from the Scottish term gramarye (magic, enchantment, spell), an alteration of the English word grammar (any sort of scholarship)” http://ewonago.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/etymology-of-glamour/

I want to be a theorist.  I want to be a showgirl.  These two desires, which I try to reconcile, are brought together in the etymology of glamour.  The glamour-spell affecting the eye.  The spell of the viewer cursed to interpret what s/he sees.  We can never believe what we see, because we are constantly trying to peer through the haze of our own projections onto what we see.  The haze can never clear, we can never see something on its own terms because we are not mechanically viewing devices; cameras.  We are interpreting subjects, condemned to only ever see through our own flawed eyes.  

The Subjectification of Leigh Ledare's Mom

Review of Leigh Ledare: The Confectioner's Confectioner, 16th April - 5th June, Pilar Corrias, London

Leigh Ledare’s ongoing photography work generously reveals the relationship he has with his mother.  In the recent solo show at Pilar Corrias fragments from his childhood, notes written by Tina/Mom and himself make explicit some elements of their relationship.  Tina/Mom’s thoughts on models is a beautiful ode to the creativity of the photographer’s model, her informal hand-written will expose the love and trust she places in Leigh.  A narrative develops through the notes; the relationship with Dad ended, and Leigh, in some way become Mom’s man/boy.  She talked to him, revealed herself emotionally and physically.  As a ballet dancer, she was trained to be invested in her body, her artistic tool.  This is the back story.  One day, Tina/Mom asks Leigh to photograph her, to record her aging, vulnerable body now, before it is too late, before the flesh decays into an unphotographable state; before it can no longer be the object.  And so Leigh dutifully does.  Complicit in this recording, he is the third person in the room whilst Tina/Mom gets it on with Leigh-substitute boys.  Her acts performed for Leigh, a performance for his benefit.  Does she want to arouse Leigh?  Make him jealous?  Or push him to reject her out of repulsion for her sexuality, her aggressive exhibitionism designed to ensnare Leigh in an Oedipal game.  Does she want him to throw down the camera and fuck her, pushing aside his replacement?  Sometimes she is naked and alone, still enjoying her sexuality, but without a partner, less performed.  If Leigh did not record this, if he did not have his camera in the room, how would he have reacted?  How did he react, used as Tina/Mom’s sexual documenter?

Which answers the question, how can a sexually explicit photograph of a woman present without question the subjectivity of that woman, before or even preventing the objectification of that woman?  Through the Oedipal narrative, Leigh becomes less the exploiting photographer and more an equal participant with the subject.  The two locked into their fixed positions.  The captions with the photographs, descriptively position the image contents.  But even without such contexts, within the image frame, the faint silvery traces of stretch marks on Tina/Mom’s stomach testify to her mother status and jar with her version of maternal she is therefore enacting.

Leigh reaches beyond this project to challenge his own position from outside this mother-son courtship.  Understanding the plane of representation as ‘the site of the trauma’, the place in which his Mom revealed herself to him, but in a sense foreclosed other possibilities of their relationship, he places himself in Mom’s position by re-enacting her fantasies by being the fantasy for other women.  Leigh becomes women’s object, the Leigh-object: a gift for mother?  Leigh-photographer becomes Leigh-model relinquishing the responsibilities of the lens.

In The Archive

Today I wore white cotton gloves and handled photographs in the research room at the National Media Museum in Bradford. I am looking at two kinds of glamour, a very perfect one, with dreamy colours, courtesy of Walter Bird, and a slightly more real one, from the Daily Herald archive.  The reportage of dancing lines, rehearsal stretches, promotional poses on beaches/airports/streets outside venues.  Something real slips into the photos unnoticed, working against the artifice, tearing a whole in the glamour.  For example a plaster on a bare foot on a girl in a line standing on some driftwood on a beach and a hole in some fishnets, close to the camera.  In a 1956 photo of Tiller girls resting during a ‘Royal Command Show’ rehearsal, rest their legs (neatly) on the chairs in front.  Underneath one pair of fishnets are white ankle socks. 

Walter Bird's photographs however, construct a perfect glamour, the glamour of day-dreams.  Working before the WW2 he used an expensive colour process, Vivex, which I believe is one contributing factor to their loveliness.

There does seem to be a glamour peak in the 1930s.  By the 1950s, something, ‘common’ appears to have been invented, is it the film, cameras, lighting, hairstyles, costumes or make up?  Obviously technological changes in one or all of the above contribute to an erosion of the glamour aesthetic.  Which leads me to wonder, what and who makes glamour?