NYC

After a seven hour flight to NYC, a rough hostel stay for two nights, a breakfast of over 3000 calories and a carnivalisque performance event in Brooklyn I have arrived back in Blighty, back from Jonny Porkpie’s Cocks and Shocks night, http://www.pinchbottom.com and what a night it was, advertised and contextualized as ‘Jonny Porkpie’s Bad Ideas ‘SHOCKS & C*CKS: ALL NUDE, ALL DUDE REVUE.

Hosted by a naked (sometimes semi covered) Jonny Porkpie it featured Albert Cadabra’s wonderfully complex comedic escapology striptease, Ferro’s hot sensual hula hooping, Hard Corey’s clever bottle opening act in which he lampoons the patricarchal sexist male, Mat Fraser’s performative complications of the male sexual body through exotic and freak show stripteases and neocabaret songs, and finally Tigger’s comedic, high energy, camp, disco hot and beautifully twisted priest act.

To summarize this event I need to paraphrase  Jonny Porkpie who set up this evening by openly and honestly giving his opinion that burlesque had gone beyond simple striptease, it was a performance art, and this evening was to be all about ‘the cock’. This event revealed beautifully the males last taboo, and with it, all the issues of revealing, the shrinkage, its’ comical shape, its pathetic-ness its massiveness, it potency and the performers own rescripting of it as an object of glamour, of athleticism, as a joke vagina and the celebration of the absolute togetherness of these physically, geographically and sexualy different males.

This event peeled away so many taboos and left exposed multiple ’tales’ to digest and acts to experience. It was a defining celebration of the male burlesquer and his craft.  ‘We laughed back stage at our own shrinkage, or opposite, we cheered each others stage antics and lunacies, we aided each other as stage hands, we heckled from the bar, ‘COCK’ and it made me, British Heart want more. I passionately want to dig deeper into this art form of tease, sensuality, reveal, lunacy and irreverence. Challenging my supposed non performative maleness, and to interpret my own maleness and burlesque it. I want my naked body in huge tun of Gin, with bubbles, plastic pricks and a rubber Maggie Thatcher, all encompassed by a gaggle of spectators with drawn straws. I want to pound the stage as a high camp drag Tarzan, Disco beats and disco balls, kidnapping spectators and forcing them into awkward games of tease and peelfor my cannibalistic jungle chef  preperations of grilled body bits. I want…

For me this one night said so much about the present state of burlesque.  This event will be the final reveal for my PhD.  The pages of my PhD leading to the final reveals we all made that night.