As some of you may already know, the neighborhood where the new 40 Deuce club in New York is going to be opened is not happy about the prospect of a burlesque club joining their patch of real estate.
It is without question that New York City is a place in which the artistic community is permitted to take great risks and utilize all the tools the trade has to offer - nudity included - to express themselves. The community standards for this particular neighborhood dictate that what the 40 Deuce has to offer is not in line with the moral standards of an average person in their community as a whole. It would seem that these two viewpoints (combined with the club's primary focus of making obscene amounts of money, to be sure) are at odds with one another. Removing the financial aspect from the picture, we are left with the conundrum of an establishment that is dedicated to the art of the tease and a community that wants nothing to do with something they feel is so morally bankrupt as stripping.
In the eyes of the general public, is there any difference between a traditional gentlemen's club and a burlesque club? Would any amount of education and discussion with the general public about the art of burlesque change that perception? Or, despite the fact that we make a deliberate distinction in what we do and how we do it, are we really just strippers underneath all the glitter and glitz?
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2 comments:
Are we strippers? Well, sure. Even those who accent the "tease" aspect of striptease can't really get by without at least a little bit of strip, and that's always going to place us outside of certain standards of acceptability for some people.
Also, burlesque will always mean different things to different performers. The show that I'm in holds to a pretty classical and narrow definition of what's acceptable for a striptease, but I've seen burlesque performances in other venues that utilized pretty much every trick in the strip club playbook, up to and including lap dances for audience members. Nothing wrong with it, although it's not the sort of burlesque I choose to do, but it does somewhat complicate the community standards question. What sort of burlesque do you have to do in order to be judged a credit to the neighborhood?
Before I comment I want to say I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO 40 DEUCE IN LA. However, from what I hear they are far more focused on the choreographed dance aspect of burlesque than most people in the burlesque community are used to. Hearsay tells me it's more of a cabaret where the top eventually comes off than a strip club. In fact, it's about as far from strip club as burlesque can get.
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