By: Amelia-Rose Williams
Glitz, glamour, drama, dance and the great love of performance that is Burlesque! The great Christina Aguilera plays Alice Marilyn, who at the beginning of the movie seems to be down on her luck and tired of the current life she was leading. Alice has a natural talent for singing, and once she moved to Los Angeles, she also seemed to have possessed a natural talent for performance. Tess Scali, who is played by the infamous Cher, owns the club, which is facing foreclosure, and was quite hard on Alice at first.
Alice soon proves herself, and inspired by Alice, Tess is motivated to continue growing the club in the image she has always seen it to be. Up until now, I’ve always been mesmerized by dancers, ballet, tap, street performers, you name it! Between the flashy garments and the way the music takes control of them on stage, it’s all just so eye-catching. It’s hard to stop staring once you start, and you too become mesmerized by the music, the performance, it’s all art. Burlesque originated as a theatrical form of parody; it’s an Italian word, often described as “absurd” or “comically exaggerated.”Â
Historically, Burlesque arose during an experimental period of the arts where performers were beginning to play “gender bending” roles. The first woman recorded to do this was in 1817, a woman named Lucia Elizabeth Vestris, was the first woman to play a male lead in a theatrical performance. Also, one of the first women to manage a theater on her own, she had this way of being slightly “promiscuous”, in the way she carried herself both in and out of shows, which men adored.Â
However, there was a quick realization that the theater was expensive, and so when music halls became a thing of the time, a bunch of uprisings of musical theater came to the forefront. Long story short, burlesque was born. I think it’s important to revisit the history of these things because our society tends to make promiscuity taboo. We often overlook the vast history behind professional dance careers as a society and create this stigma that it’s evil or something to be ashamed of. If we allow ourselves to just take it for what it may seem, surface-level, and allow these preconceived ideologies to be shoved down our throats, we miss out on the rich history behind it. If the film Burlesque taught me anything, it allowed me to dive deeper and truly grasp the beauty behind performance and theatre.