On Halloween, OBurlesque presented “Creature Feature” at The Cat in the Cream. This event gave student performers an opportunity to craft a routine and dance freely on stage while audience members cheered them on.
Performers were not required to have experience before signing up — if they were interested in doing an act, all they had to do was send a form to OBurlesque. College fourth-year Charlie Kline collaborated with a friend to put on a shadow-casted act based on the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In this episode Buffy dates a vampire, which Kline noted was “very sexy.”
“I mostly just want to do it so that I can talk to people about Buffy, [and] so that people will come up to me and be like, ‘I have also seen and loved Buffy,’” Kline said.
This was Kline’s first time performing with OBurlesque, but they’ve always found the club accessible.
“OBurlesque is so chill that I think it’s just going to be fun, mostly because it’s all my friends in the audience,” Kline said. “I just feel like it’s a very welcoming environment where you can do whatever you want, and people are really supportive.”
Many attend OBurlesque to see friends’ performances, including College third-year Katrina Ganson.
“I [was] particularly excited for Charlie’s Buffy performance, as I am a Buffy fan, and I love when people are experimenting with really fun pop culture references in their drag or their [burlesque] performance,” Ganson said. “I think that it engages the audience in a really fun way because they also have their own associations with the media.”
Some performers include pop culture references and pop songs, but others include classical music, like Conservatory fourth-year Sasha Paris-Carter, who studies composition.
“I love to dress up, and I wanted a space to perform outside of the Conservatory where I could have creative control and still perform at the level that I wanted to without having to adhere to the expectations placed on how you’re supposed to look [while performing] classical music,” Paris-Carter said.
With an act centering Mary Tudor, also known as Bloody Mary, Paris-Carter “let the music do the talking, and the stripping aid the story.”
“[Burlesque is] like resistance in this culture that teaches us to be ashamed of ourselves,” Paris-Carter said. “I don’t feel the shame anymore that I used to feel in high school because my body’s become a performance tool. I’ve become curious rather than judgmental [because of OBurlesque].”
OBurlesque invites not only curiosity but also vulnerability in performers and attendees. College third-year and OBurlesque’s media coordinator Z Gutierrez emphasized how OBurlesque is a body positive, consensual space.
“I think that’s a huge part of OBurlesque — want[ing] everyone to be 100 percent comfortable,” Gutierrez said.
At the Halloween show, Gutierrez participated in two group acts, one of which was based on Monster High characters.
“[The idea] started off in Discord,” Gutierrez said. “I was just like, ‘I would kill to do a Monster High Burlesque,’ and then someone else was like, ‘I would so do that with you.’ Then someone else was like, ‘I would love to join,’ so then we ended up with five people. Then we all chatted about which character we wanted to do, which character we felt represented us the most, [and we even] took quizzes. One of us actually had never watched the Monster High movie, so we did a movie night just for some research. Then we just started rehearsing, often [using] the self dance studios in the basement of South.”
Many see the Halloween show as a perfect opportunity to put on story-based acts, which can be funny and surprising.
“Sometimes you feel like you have to hide the fact that you have a body from the general public and that you know what sex is,” Kline said. “So I guess there’s something cool about [OBurlesque] being in this really welcoming environment, and [having the ability to make you think], ‘I do, in fact, have a body [and can be silly with it].”
