The new Immodesty
Lloyd Evans welcomes the Hollywood ‘bombshell’ back to Soho Ever been lap-dancing? Oh, it’s great. You and a bunch of City bankers can gather in a sweaty Soho basement and watch a size-zero asylum-seeker with vacant eyes gyrating around a pole that’s fractionally wider than she is.
Professional striptease hasn’t always been as cheerless and mercenary as this, and now a movement led by Immodesty Blaize and Dita Von Teese aims to put the fun back into stage nudity. Ms Blaize shot to prominence in 2003 when she appeared in a Goldfrapp video, and last year she was seen with Von Teese in a special Christmas episode of Channel 4’s Faking It. The two have plenty in common. Both are big girls and proud of it and they’re inspired by the golden era of Hollywood when stars like Mae West and Zsa Zsa Gabor thrilled audiences with their voluptuous figures and ribald humour. The word ‘burlesque’ has been co-opted to describe their new style of vintage striptease. ‘It’s all about glamour, escapism and bloody good fun,’ says Ms Blaize, who got her name, bizarrely enough, from the gas-fitter. He happened to spot her in her make-up and he blurted out that she looked like Modesty Blaize, the cartoon character. ‘Immodesty, more like,’ thought Blaize. And her stage persona was born.
I went to see her in action at the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly. I could tell straight away that this wasn’t your average lap-dancing joint (the doorman didn’t try to sell me Viagra), and the crowd looked different too. No rowdy gangs of beery chaps, but courting couples stylishly dressed and groups of twenty-something women. Retro gear was the dominant theme: the girls in fishnets, long skirts and neat little hats; the men in gangster pin-stripes from the 1930s. The Pigalle has the intimate atmosphere of a speakeasy. There’s a gallery overlooking a candlelit din ing space where dark-suited waiters bustle about ferrying cocktails to smooching couples. I worked my way to the front.
A four-piece swing band, all suited and booted, were bringing their set to a close. As they bowed and left the platform, a large white bath manifested itself on stage. This was unexpected and rather mysterious. Streams of bubbles floated into the air all around it. Then a beautiful blonde stepped out wearing white kinky lingerie, like a Botticelli angel dressed by Ann Summers. Had Ms Blaize dyed her hair? Surely not. The Botticelli angel picked up two vast feather-fans and held them over the bath, forming a screen. From behind, a dark shape sidled on stage and lowered itself into the tub. The angel then withdrew the fans — but the bath was empty. A moment of suspense. Then a white foot emerged, like a magical apparition from the lake in Le Morte d’Arthur. Then a second foot appeared, its plump gleaming contours perfectly mirroring the first. The two limbs, disembodied apparently, began a shimmying criss-cross dance that seemed completely surreal and strangely funny. They drew together, the big toes ‘kissing’ each other goodbye, and sank slowly back into the bath. Then Ms Blaize herself rose and presented her ample figure to the crowd. Her nakedness was veiled only by a scanty thong and an arrangement of tasselled glitter covering the peaks of her breasts. She smirked at us, wiggled her shoulders and the tassels sprang into life. Incredible!
Her breasts began to boogie asymmetrically, the left tassel windmilling clockwise, the right one anticlockwise. (Presumably it’s the other way round in the southern hemisphere.) The crowd applauded knowledgably like opera connoisseurs after a notoriously tricky aria. What next? The assistant stepped forward with an electric-blue dress which Ms Blaize climbed into. This is one of her specialities, the backwards striptease, and the effect is improbably suggestive and sexy. Finally she withdrew, fully clothed, waving like a divinity to her admirers. And backstage she peeled off her clothes and prepared for her next show at midnight.
The sudden popularity of this arthouse erotica must have come as a complete surprise to clubland. But not to Ms Blaize. ‘For a long time, people were thinking about the future, about fast cars, space travel, internet porn, and now we’ve had that. The new fantasy is looking back, at the good old days of the Hollywood bombshell, of the slinky starlets. You can see it in everything from interiors in bars and clubs to fashion — in corsetry and the female form.’ About time too. It’s farewell to those scrawny pole-dancing broilers and hello to a welcome dollop of boob, belly and bum.
David Montgomery, courtesy of the Scream Gallery
THREE OF THE BEST: Hip Hip, London www.thewhoopeeclub.com High Tease, London www.ministryofburlesque.com The Candy Box, Birmingham www.candyboxburlesque.com
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