Long before the curtain rises, within the walls of every city, run the stages of its sidewalks, street corners, alleyways, stations, cathedrals, dressing rooms, the lights of the marquee - some built for spectacle, some appearing the instant a pair of eyes meets another; and every performance, whether artifice or real, asks what it reveals, and what it conceals. Uniforms. Aprons. A practiced smile. The quiet elevator. We learn these choreographies until they pass for instinct. A role is often an accommodation—a way of passing oneself in society. Habit settles into gesture. Gesture settles into posture. Eventually the body forgets where the performance began.
burlesque
Burlesque is an art of interruption. The familiar language of glamour, exaggeration, theater, and desire are bent until something unexpected appears - continually reinvented by those who transform the stage into a place of possibility, where wit, illusion, confidence, vulnerability, and control all exist in a delicate balance. Mannerisms become declarations, costumes amplify character, entrances and exits are movements of careful construction; and they open the dialogue between who we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, and who we dare to become in front of others.
