We walked out of our Atlanta show to the sound of a young man screaming from a hill overlooking the parking lot, spewing scripture and calling us abortion-loving, hell-bound whores. He kept screaming “wake up, wake up, wake up”. Some of the audience members and the venue owner were screaming back at him—apparently this happens often. The Tennessee-based performers told us that they frequently perform in Georgia because the Tennessee scene is subject to outdated obscenity laws that forbid anyone from “buying food for a burlesque girl”, and threaten performers with a $30,000 fine if they show underboob or the area where the butt connects to the thigh, which the Tennessee girls call “the vortex”. At least at this show, the Southern girls’ acts were a lot more classic than what we generally see in New York or Seattle. It’s interesting that in New York we’re making work that’s explicitly about the good fight, which we’re so remote from. All we’re doing is preaching to the choir. In the South, they’re fighting on the front lines and, at least as far as we can tell, less insistent upon directly addressing it outright in their work. The medium is the message down here. Just performing burlesque is such a powerfully political act—you don’t have to spell it out. We are humbled and astonished by the courage of our Southern sisters, who take grave risks to provide their audiences with joyous, fun, sexy, smart, sex-positive, body-positive, feminist entertainment—in frequently hostile environments.
rhinestone gorilla burlesque is blogging about their tour. but in particular, this one paragraph stuck out to me. sometimes doing what we’re doing is fighting the good fight all in itself, but we should also keep in mind the context of our situation.
