When it comes to memorable cabaret numbers, personality only goes so far. Without clothing, there's no act – this is true even for Magic Mike's buoyant entertainment. In both its original heyday and current incarnation, stage costumes are integral to burlesque's personas and performances.
Judith Stein and Camille Sands are both subjects in Rama Rau's new documentary League of Exotique Dancers (which opened yesterday in Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver), along with other legends from the late Golden Age of burlesque such as Toni Elling, Holiday O'Hara and Kitten Natividad, who became a cult movie figure while working with director Russ Meyer. In the film, director Rau follows their respective career journeys as they converge at the Burlesque Hall of Fame's annual weekend in Las Vegas.
The retired grande dames of striptease storytelling teach the craft, and periodically tour neo-burlesque festivals as emeritus mavens, and the documentary is positioned as a sort of alternate history of feminism, especially since today's audience for the burlesque novelty act is largely female. "Young women, in their thirties and forties, a lot of that generation are still single by choice and it's a place for them to express their playfulness and sexuality," Sands says. I sat down with Stein, 68, and Sands, 69, before the film screened at this year's edition of the Hot Docs Festival to talk about how stripping down to less was empowering.
Sands and Stein started in burlesque in 1968 and 1972, respectively, but had very different styles. Sands was raised in a religious Alabama household and first became intrigued about the performance art after she saw women in beautiful gowns at a local carnival. She wanted to become an actress (burlesque lead to parts in Miami Vice in the 1980s) but didn't know what she was doing – at least initially. "I was a dumb little country girl, couldn't hardly walk in high heels," the statuesque Sands recalls. "I hired a choreographer to teach me. He worked on me for two weeks to teach me ballet moves to make me graceful because I was like a water buffalo. I'm a tomboy." Even before she stepped on stage, however, Sands says she was performing through clothes: "I was 'on' – I always wore high heels, I always had something really hot on. And I stayed that way, 24/7." Her goal was to become a headliner with her own dressing room in the old-school pin-up style, like Marilyn Monroe.
"The first 10 years of my career I did fans and birds, classic stuff," Sands says. "But because [in the late 1970s] we were losing our audience to live nude dancing and pole dancing, I came up with these acts like tribute to the Marquis de Sade and Black Widow. A lot of people in burlesque were saying it wasn't burlesque, that it was performance art."
When Sands toured in Canada, some of the venues were challenged by her towering tufts of feathers. "At one club, the stage was so small I couldn't have big headdresses or big costumes," she says. Sands kept her outfits, "for nostalgia," and though her later ones were stolen she still has her notorious blue velvet gown "with the ass [cut] out" and more glamorous looks with rhinestones, she says. These days she favours edgy studs over sequins and wears distressed denim, pyramid-stud biker boots, a wrist of skull bracelets and a leopard-print fun-fur bolero. Her fuchsia ombré manicure not only matches the magenta highlights in her hair, but the colour of her cat's-eye sunglasses.
For Stein, comedy was key to her success. Stein is from Woodbridge, Ontario and, after a brief stint as a go-go dancer to help pay for university, she cultivated an on-stage style that was sexy with a humorous wink. "Because I started later, my influences didn't relate to the old kaboom– kaboom," Stein says. "Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur were my influences – I liked the sassy woman thing. And that's where women were starting to take a hold of the music industry, too."
One stage costume was a rainbowstriped suit (cut from outdoor awning cloth) and matching straw boater; they were used for a bit in which an audience member was enlisted to help shrug off the metres-long trouser legs that trailed across the stage well past her petite frame. As feminist now as she was then, she took a playful attitude towards titillation and sexuality.
Feminists of the 1970s weren't very approving of Stein, who nonetheless became a minor celebrity by both starring in a TV commercial for the Pussycat Theatre ("I've never seen it," she says) and talking to feminist groups of the day. "I was interviewed by the Vancouver Sun once because I was working in Princeton, B.C., and I danced on the picket line for the IWA [Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada]. I'm a bit of a social activist!" she laughs. For Stein, burlesque was about empowerment, sex appeal and self-confidence. "It was after Woodstock – women had just got the right to access birth control and abortion," she says.
Whether archetypal or approaching slapstick, both women's work harkens back to the origins of burlesque; the name itself has Italian origins: burlesco is Italian for ridiculous. Camp humour is a healthy and empowering approach to sexiness because sex "is the most fun you can have without laughing," Stein quips.