For Immediate Release June 27, 2002

Burlesque Revived by Chicago Performers and Filmmakers
Sexy. Smart. Funny. Everything You've Always Wanted in a Girl Show.

Think live burlesque has faded far into its bawdy past. Not true, thanks largely to a subculture of veteran and new burlesque performers dedicated to keeping the entertainment form alive and to a new two-hour independent documentary in progress, "Welcome to Exotic World." Chicago-based filmmakers will revive burlesque July 18th at a fundraiser for the documentary that pays tribute to its legacy.

Gurlesque, a two-hour "burlesque show for the soul" to be held at 8 pm at Star Gaze, 5419 N. Clark, will feature burlesque performers, dancers, comics, singers, a knife thrower and a fire eater. Echoing promoters from the early part of the 20th century, Gurlesque organizers promise the show will be "a lavish spectacle of sight, sound, motion and color," that will "intoxicate your senses with ribaldrous innuendo, salacious music and sexy gurls."

Located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, the Exotic World Museum, its caretakers and visitors are the focus of the documentary "Welcome to Exotic World." The film will investigate America's love/hate affair with burlesque and why so many are dedicated to keeping it alive. The museum, founded by former burlesque dancer Jennie Lee and run by the former "Marilyn Monroe of burlesque," Dixie Evans,is America's only institution solely dedicated to preserving thehistory of burlesque.

Over a period of several years, this documentary will focus on the performers and fans that gather each year at the museum for the 46-50th annual reunions of burlesque dancers. Drawing on interviews of veteran and new performers, ages 20 to 80, archival footage of burlesque and historical and sociological accounts of the striptease, the documentary will peel away both sensationalism and the bias against burlesque to tell a moving tale about an irreverent and powerful entertainment form that continues to raise important questions about women, their sexuality and their public power in American culture.

Broader currents in American history, according to filmmakers, are central to understanding the long and hardy life of burlesque. Both dangerous and pleasurable, early female burlesque, starting in 1869, placed women and their sexuality at the center of theater, purposefully and insistently taking up public space. Women burlesque performers, unlike ballet dancers of the day, created meaning through winks, laughter, and wit. They held influence over audiences, addressing them with defiance, walking alone on stage with confidence, placing their female bodies in public and insisting that people pay attention to them. Women solicited laughter and desire by playing with meaning, critiquing legislators, and like traditional burlesque, making a mockery of hierarchies of the day. Early burlesque performers invoked female sexuality through language, innuendo, puns, double entendres, intonation and male drag, arousing a frenzy of desire and then eventually, censure.

Anti-burlesque campaigns have been launched periodically since 1870 when women first appeared as feature performers. One crusade during the Great Depression culminated in the outlawing of burlesque by New York City's Mayor LaGuardia. And yet, new generations of performers and fans are insistent that burlesque remain a vital and relevant part of American culture and history. Because early burlesque centered on the red-hot issues of the day, women, their sexuality and gender hierarchies, and because those issues remain significant today, burlesque lives on. Despite wave after wave of repression, burlesque continues to arouse new generations of performers and audiences who play with the meanings of women's sexuality and power in public.

This two-hour documentary moves beyond an examination of burlesque as a novel entertainment form to an investigation of what burlesque and its continued, although intermittent, popularity can reveal about gender, sexuality and display in American culture over the long 20th century.