Emily
Lauren infuses her burlesque characters
with 21st-century attitude
By ROBERT TRUSSELL - The Kansas City Star
Not your father’s showgirl
If Emily Lauren
hadn’t decided to enroll at the Dell’Arte
International School of Physical Theatre
in Blue Lake, Calif., she might never have
met the British sword swallower.
And it was from the sword
swallower that she heard the word —
the word that turned her creative life around.
And if she had never heard the word, she
never would have developed sexy-strange
characters that locals have seen on occasion
in the last couple of years in bars and
galleries: Sugar Puppy, Ms. Sallow Mae,
Toyota’ Se’dan, Ms. Cherry Intact,
Little Miss Tiny Tuesday.
And if she had never developed
those characters, she couldn’t do
what she will do Friday night: present “Burlesque
& the Art of Striptease: A Recital”
at the Farm Gallery on 18th Street. Lauren
and 10 to 15 of her students will perform
at the one-night-only event.
“I first heard the
word ‘burlesque’ from one of
the girls that I was in school with,”
Lauren recalled. “She was a female
sword swallower from London, and she just
had more experience in what was going on
with the neo-burlesque movement out there
on the West Coast. … I don’t
know when I discovered it, but when I heard
the word and saw a couple of images, I knew
I could re-create it and make it my own.”
Anyone who has seen Lauren
perform knows how true that last statement
is. But it all goes back to the word. She
spent four uninspired years getting a theater
degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas
City before deciding to take a nine-month
course at Dell’Arte. She wasn’t
really sure what kind of performer she wanted
to be.
“I spent four years
in Kansas City really, to be honest, pretty
depressed,” she said. “I wasn’t
inspired. I felt really bad about not knowing
what I wanted to do. And that was the word
that changed it.”
Before all that she had
nurtured a dream that had little to do with
burlesque, neo or otherwise. It’s
one reason the St. Louis native ended up
in Kansas City as a UMKC undergraduate.
“My dream was to join
Disney on Ice,” she said. “I
only applied to one college because I was
very sure I was going to make it when I
was 18. Lo and behold, I didn’t make
it. So I decided to come to college and
Kansas City had an ice rink, so …”
Kansas City, of course,
knows burlesque. The stage of the Folly
Theater was home to classic bump-and-grinders
(including Gypsy Rose Lee and Tempest Storm).
Striptease artists performed at the Folly
from 1941 until the early 1970s.
What Lauren does pays homage,
in a weird way, to those who came before,
but the connection is tenuous at best.
The neo-burlesque movement,
as it’s often called, began in the
early to mid-1990s and has been in vogue
on the coasts — as well as Canada
and Britain — for several years. It
can take different forms, including meticulous
re-creations of old-school striptease artistry
as practiced by Sally Rand, the legendary
fan dancer of the 1930s, or Blaze Starr
in the ’50s. But it can also be a
sort of postmodern feminist commentary that
makes fun of the aesthetics of striptease
even while celebrating the tradition.
“To some contemporary
women, performing retro striptease is a
feminist act and a social obligation, a
way to wrest the art of stripping from the
world of pornographers,” writes theater
historian Rachel Shteir in her 2004 book
Striptease: The Untold Story of the Girlie
Show. “ … Of course, critics
do not always agree. As Adam Gopnik noted
in the New Yorker, mingling performance
art and old-fashioned striptease can either
yield provocative results or implode into
a sad, dull evening.”
But none of that applies
precisely to Emily Lauren, whose performances
reveal an absurdist sense of humor.
When she performed “Sugar
Puppy & the Lovely Dumplings”
at the inaugural edition of KC Fringe last
year, audiences encountered a roller coaster
of moods and images as Lauren moved through
a series of bizarre masks and carefully
thought-out costumes.
At times the wild humor
seemed designed to collide head-to-head
with the performance’s inherent sexiness.
How often have you seen an alluring young
woman wearing a brown plastic dog mask while
playing a ukulele and miming Judy Garland’s
recording of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?
“Nobody ever does
anything like Emily does,” said Bill
Sundahl. “It seems to be a general
rule of her life.”
Sundahl produces periodic
editions of the Donkey Show at area bars.
They’re really variety shows more
or less in the vaudeville tradition involving
musicians, dancers and novelty acts. Lauren
has performed at several of them.
“She’s probably
my favorite performer we’ve had back
at the show,” Sundahl said. “She
constantly wows me. It’s like a different
person. When you talk to her she’s
a nice, demure, quiet, mild-mannered woman,
and then when she gets on stage you get
17 different people.”
Sundahl added that Lauren
is a perfect fit with the Donkey Show.
“First time I saw
her I said, ‘Who is this woman?’
” he said. “She’s part
clown, part burlesque, part freak show —
I don’t know. But she’s brilliant
at what she does.”
Lauren said she developed
her characters gradually. Even today, no
two performances are the same.
“The first time I
ever performed I crashed Jilly’s,”
she said. “They used to do open mic
nights. It was like comedians, poets and
musicians. I did Toyota’ Se’dan.
She’s the one I started with. She’s
my clown stripper. Then I did open mic night
at Stanford & Sons when it was still
in Westport. I just pretty much crashed
the party. Nobody knew what to say or what
to expect. Afterwards they said, ‘Are
you OK?’ because I’d throw myself
around.”
Then she and a friend, a
belly dancer, performed on Goth Night at
Davey’s Uptown Rambler’s Club
for about three months.
“I started coming
up with some dances, kind of burlesque-type
dancing and striptease,” she said.
“It was terrible. People in black
and trippy music and they wanted like fetish
acts in-between. … I didn’t
fit in there at all. It was a place to dance,
but I was too funny for Goths. I couldn’t
take myself quite that seriously.”
Each of her characters had
a different starting point. Little Miss
Tiny Tuesday, inspired by the Commedia dell’arte
stock character Colombina, is prissy on
the outside but a troublemaker underneath.
Ms. Sallow Mae was built around oversized
butterfly wings Lauren found at a crafts
fair in Oregon; with them she performs a
topless fan dance that reveals almost nothing.
Kinky Minx, whom Lauren
will perform at the recital, was designed
to show off her acrobatic skills (as in
simultaneous headstands and leg splits).
Ms. Cherry Intact was suggested by her husband,
musician Bryan Sanders. (“The whole
routine is full of fruit and penis puns,”
she explained.)
Sugar Puppy began when she
found the plastic dog mask; it evolved into
a “silent, Chaplinesque, very innocent
kind of character.”
And then there’s Toyota’
Se’dan.
“She’s the one,”
Lauren said. “If I were to say any
of my characters are my alter ego, she’s
the one. She’s the reason I do burlesque.
Her whole character is a play on the super-serious
personality of the archetypical stripper
who is very concerned about her appearance
and considers herself very, very hot. Really,
she just wants to be a professional dancer
but, alas, she’s just a clown. She
fails, but people love her because she fails.”
Her performing students
run the gamut.
“We have a girl who’s
a senior in high school up to a grandmother,”
she said. “There’s a mother
of three. I’ve got a med student from
UMKC and a couple of other college students.
Even a librarian. But for the most part
they’re young and looking for a way
to express themselves, I think.”
One thing about neo-burlesque
that sets it apart from pole-dancing at
a strip club is that it appeals to women,
maybe more than it appeals to men. It’s
about the artistry and not so much about
nudity.
“You know, if men
want to see naked women, then most of the
time they’ll go to a strip club,”
she said. “This is a place where women
can connect with what’s on stage and
relate to it. … I see it as very innocent.
I really do. It’s always with a wink
and a smile. There’s nothing that
blatant about it at all. Compared to what
you see on TV, to be completely honest,
it’s innocent and tame.
By
ROBERT TRUSSELL - The Kansas City Star
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