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Roxy Velvet

February 10, 2009
Venetia Rainey

Venetia Rainey interviews burlesque star Roxy Velvet and explores the Vaudevillean.

Burlesque is a concept with a widely misunderstood meaning. Very different from the seedy pole dancing of a Spearmint Rhino club, burlesque is in fact traditionally a performance genre of comedy, satire and acrobatics: less strip, more tease.

It began in Victorian Britain, when upper class entertainments such as opera, ballet and theatre were doing a roaring trade, and when the glimpse of an ankle was considered deeply erotic. The response from the lower classes? Burlesque. A medley of farce, dance and music, often featuring pastiches of current songs and productions.

The craze was quickly exported to the United States of America where English Burlesque’s humour merged with the vaudeville culture of variety theatre and gaudiness.

Since then the genre has snow-balled, adapting to each decade’s desires, and morphing in both meaning and form. It absorbed ideas from Paris’ notorious Moulin Rouge, as well as American trans-sexual and trans-gender shows. It dropped the anti-class pretensions and elements of musical and theatrical parody.

Now, burlesque, or neo-burlesque as some people would have it called, is having a revival. From the Pinchbottom Burlesque club in New York, to The Speakeasy on Gillygate in our own York, the performance genre is more popular and accessible than ever.

What entices burlesque artists to perform when they no longer need to push the erotic envelope, or rebel against elitist entertainment?

Roxy Velvet, an English burlesque star, elaborates: “I love being on stage, it feels like where I belong. Sometimes it’s testing because you have to live out of a suitcase and appear to be on form no matter what. There is so much to be considered; costume, props, music, choreography. I can’t imagine doing anything else, I’ve been performing all my life on different platforms. I never set out to be a ‘burlesque’ dancer; I was just swept up in burlesque’s glamour.”

A Roxy Velvet show transports you into a whole other world. Each mini show, of which there are dozens, really does create what Roxy calls a “micro world” from the stranded mermaid with the sailor, to the snow queen performed to Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’, every detail meticulously executed.

She is inspired by the early to mid-twentieth century, a time when sexuality was more hidden, and this is shown in her use of vintage underwear, costume and make up. “I adore vintage circus and I constantly refer to Taschen’s Circus and a film called The Greatest Show on Earth. I watch a lot of old movies and am perpetually star struck by glamorous silver screen icons like Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich.”

One of her shows sees Roxy Velvet as a crisp 1940’s nurse ‘shredding her immaculate dress, piercing herself with needles, cutting herself open, and wrenching and ripping her organs out before dying during an erotic crescendo of a fountain of blood. In this chilling and seductive character she becomes a pure object for narcissistic masochistic destruction and pornographic defilement.’ According to Roxy, however, this “masochistic” element is not at all common in her shows, “I wanted to make a gore show based on the precedents of striptease. The performer is both aggressive and vulnerable, exposing herself and permitting the audience to experience it.”

Another more common and less controversial feature of her shows is the Birdcage. “It works on so many levels because it’s frivolous and larger than life but also practical as it acts an aerial rig and a performance platform,” Roxy explains. “A birdcage is an allegory for the containment of something vulnerable, precious, beautiful or possible dangerous. For me it harks back to the old circus days when rare animals and beautiful freaks would be displayed in cages and boxes.”

Clearly burlesque performance artists have plenty to give, but Roxy is adamant about what it takes: “Blood, sweat and sequins!”