Va-Va-Va-Boom: Burlesque in Sebastopol

Glamorous performance art or old-fashioned sexploitation? You decide.

For Sweet Beat Petite, burlesque is an extension of dance, with an erotic though not necessarily sexual charge. (Photo from Sweet Beat Petite)

A few years ago, I began noticing burlesque shows being advertised around Sebastopol, usually as a part of a larger celebration—Halloween or Valentine’s Day celebrations at HopMonk or New Year’s Eve at Subud Hall, a venue that is normally associated with bellydance performances.

It made me wonder: Was this relic of an art form from America’s sexually repressed mid-century (and earlier) really making a comeback? And in Sebastopol of all places? How did that happen?

To find out, I reached out to two local burlesque performers—Velvet Thorn of Sebastopol and Graton’s Sweet Beat Petite (not their real names)—as well as to SRJC Theater Arts Professor Coleen Scott Trivet, a former burlesque artist turned academic.

Turns out, I’m behind the times. Burlesque—or neo-burlesque as Trivet calls it—has just been slow in reaching Sonoma County. According to Trivet, it boomed in New York, New Orleans and Seattle in the nineties—becoming “niche but hugely popular” as part of the ’90s vintage revival. She said it has simply grown from there.

Burlesque has a checkered past. Trivet said it was born in Britain as an all-women theater company and imported to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, where, over the next 50 years, it was influenced by ballet, Moulin Rouge and the Follies on the high end and circus, vaudeville and girlie shows on the low end.

Always centered around the female body, burlesque had a male audience for much of its early history. In the 40s and 50s, it moved into the mainstream—becoming a glamorous nightclub entertainment for both men and women. In the sixties, it hit the skids, finding it hard to compete with body-baring miniskirts and bikinis—and in the 70s with strip clubs and the porn industry.

“I think of the 40s and 50s as the Golden Age of Burlesque because that was the moment that captured this art form as its own thing,” said Trivet, author of the book, The Costumes of Burlesque: 1865-2018. “It was still centered on women, and it was still centered on women being powerful and adored and admired versus some of the public attitudes that started happening when the porn industry came in and strip clubs came in. The audience is very different if you’re a featured dancer in a strip club than if you were a featured dancer in the best burlesque theater in the country in the ’50s. That was a completely different audience and attitude toward the performance.”

The vintage revival of the 1990s saved burlesque, rescuing it from its association with porn and strip clubs and restoring some of its touch-me-not glamour.

“Look but don’t touch,” is how Velvet Thorn describes it. Thorn—who works in HR by day—is a small and strikingly pretty young woman with a background in theater. She’s relatively new to burlesque, inspired to take up the art form by the work of burlesque artist Dita Von Teese, Marilyn Manson’s ex-wife, who Trivet calls “The Gypsy Rose Lee of Modern Burlesque.”

“I saw her do this martini glass routine, and I just thought, ‘Wow, I want to do this,’” Thorn said.

“Burlesque, at least to me, is about creating glamor, creating a mystique,” said Thorn, who used to practice alone in her room as an 18-year-old before bringing her act to the stage. “You might not be the prettiest person, you might not be the skinniest or the most desirable, but you can—if you’re coming into burlesque and you want to perform—you get on that stage and create glamor.”

“I think it’s also a really political thing as well,” Thorn continued, “because there’s so many places that it’s not okay to expose the body, right? It’s not okay to be sexual. There’s a lot of judgment around women’s bodies and how we appear, and I think that in burlesque, we take control of that. You’re sitting on your butt in the chair for four minutes, and you’re gonna watch me do my thing, gosh darn it, and you need to cheer and support me every time I take something off.”

“I think the big difference is that you are your own choreographer. You’re your own director. You’re your own workout coach. You’re your own costume designer. You’re in charge of figuring everything out,” Thorn said.

Velvet Thorn in her element. (Photo by Glenn Herring)

Sweet Beat Petite, who lives in Graton and also works as a life coach and energy practitioner, is a dancer who’s done burlesque for several years. She feels that burlesque was a response to the sexual repressiveness that characterized the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Burlesque, in my interpretation, is an art form that’s really about expressing in a safe container the beauty of an art form that’s based around dance and comes with beautiful costuming and sparkles and feathers,” she said. “It’s originally from a time and an era where we needed more levity and lightness around freedom of expression. It really came from a light-hearted place. It was not necessarily all about booties and titties, but about creating lightness around some of the more challenging topics.”

Asked about the difference between stripping and burlesque, Petite said “Stripping, in my mind, can be a form of personal empowerment, yet I feel like the intention is deeply rooted around sexual energy. Whereas I feel like burlesque, the foundational quality of energy that it carries is more about freedom of expression and feeling safe in one’s body and feeling safe to be self-expressed in an erotic way, but not necessarily in a sexual way. And it comes with a little bit more lightheartedness and campiness.”

Thorn put it this way: “Stripping is a service. Burlesque is a performance.” She also noted that, except for burlesque performers at the very top of the field, strippers make more money than burlesque performers.

Thorn and Trivet also said the audiences are different. The audience for most strip clubs is male, while the audience for burlesque today tends to be mixed or even mostly female.

“You always have to look at the audiences,” Trivet said. “The audiences for burlesque are not all men. They’re not even primarily men most of the time. If you look at any burlesque audience, you’re going to see women, men, couples, all genders, like certainly queer community representation—you’re going to see that on stage too, in burlesque shows now. It is a varied audience.”

There are two upcoming opportunities to experience burlesque in Sebastopol. Velvet Thorn will be performing at the Sirens Prohibition Winter Gala on Saturday, Feb. 8. Sweet Beat Petite will be performing in the Valentine’s Day Burlesque & Cabaret at Hopmonk on Friday, Feb. 14.