a look back at BurlyCon - part two

Now where was I... ah yes, Friday afternoon.

At 1pm I went to Dr. Lucky’s History of American Burlesque 1860 - 1930. At the beginning Dr. Lucky went around the room and had everyone state why they came to the session and then she broke it down from the beginning, talking about the moment in 1868 when literary burlesque was transformed to live performance by Lydia Thompson and the Blond Bombshells. These women were disrupting the gender hierarchies in the theater of their time. Dr. Lucky then took us through the 1870s when managers merged burlesque with the structure of minstrel shows.

Just writing the term "minstrel show" makes me cringe a little, but I know it's an area to study that I don't know enough about. In Baba Israel's book, Remixing the Ritual: Hip Hop Theatre Aesthetics and Practice, he quotes Eric Lott from his essay Black Face and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture.

"...James Weldon Johnson similarly remarked that minstrelsy... constituted the only 'completely original contribution' of America to the Theatre.... These judgments appear terribly misguided now, given that Black face minstrelsy's century long commercial regulation of Black cultural practices stalled the development of African-American public arts and generated an enduring narrative of racist ideology."

Baba then writes "How do we negotiate the authentic artistic contributions of minstrelsy origins and also challenge its racist and limiting legacy? In our current mainstream popular culture, race is being played to the extreme."

So yeah, I definitely want to learn more about minstrelsy and its influence on burlesque.

And back to the workshop, next Dr. Lucky talked about Vaudeville and burlesque, and how Vaudeville defined itself as the antithesis to burlesque, how vaudeville was "clean and orderly" and catered to women and "all classes".

Throughout the next hour I took 5 pages of notes. Dr. Lucky went on to cover the myth of Little Egypt and the 1893 World's Fair, the Cooch Spreads (which she admitted is her favorite thing to write on the board of an academic institution, Burlesque Wheels (touring circuits around the US,) Ziefield's Construction of the American Show Girl, Minsky's "Modern Burlesque" and more.

and that's all you get for now, stay tuned for part three, where I recount Tigger's Boylesque workshop and more...

peace,
Aurora