Getting the Fever

Blog by Colin Chaloner | 10 Apr 2010

Usually when I see someone naked on stage they're molesting a dead animal or tearing strips of their own flesh off in the name of art, so it wasn't without hesitation that I agreed to reveiw something as apparently sacreligious as a burlesque night. "Surely the naked body's impact must be reserved for statements about factory farming, Tibet, the sex industry and so on?" I thought to myself, "Surely recognising this nonsense as an 'art-form' is a betrayal of everything I believe?" But I was intrigued and in the end decided to give it a go, sauntering down to Ivory Blacks for the launch of saucy new night Scarlett Fever.

I had an idea of what to expect, perhaps something like the Maison Derriere, the 'house of loose ethics' denounced by Marge in the Simpsons, but eventually embraced by Springfield as a harmless thrill, as something less ghastly than those seedy strip joints where wealthy tycoons pay the less fortunate to humiliate themselves. Or maybe titillation wouldn't even be the point. I'd been to the disco and seen my friends dancing and crooning to the hits from Moulin Rouge and Dirty Dancing. Perhaps burlesque was more about girls showing off and celebrating their femininity, something lovely and positive and bland, like How to Look Good Naked or the Dove Real Beauty ads. Or maybe it's just about nostalgia, about fetishising some arbitrary era - in this case the 1930s.

In the end there was a measure of all of this to Scarlett Fever. But what it ultimately brought to mind was of course Barthes' analysis of wrestling in the opening chapter of the Mythologies, where he tells us that 'Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.' Just as Barthes' wrestlers create a unique imagery of suffering and injustice, the stripteases of Chassy Van Klaas and Dolly Tartan seem to dramatise an emotional state with haiku-like economy, exploring through physicality of the extremes of liberation and decadence. A good night out altogether.