Jo Weldon's New York School of Burlesque

Andrew Davis teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and is one of the few people for whom the label “straight man” is a job description. He is the taller, more sophisticated half of the comedy team of Doc and Stumpy, and has performed classic burlesque comedy in Los Angeles and at burlesque and vaudeville festivals around the U.S. He holds a M.A. in Folklore from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. He is the author of America’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre (Penn State Press) and he operates the website BaggyPantsComedy.com. I interviewed Doc about his spectacularly detailed, informative, and entertaining book,  Baggy Pants Comedy Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. When did you publish this book? How long did it take? The book was published in 2011.  It was actually my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2000.  I’d gotten another book contract in the meantime, so I delayed a few years in revising the dissert...

Camille 2000 was the first burlesque queen to introduce Aggressive Art to burlesque with her tribute to Marquis De Sade. With the tagline “The Girl for Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” she’s a performer no one can forget. She posed for elite photographers, travelled with trunks of costumes and props, and once had a Japanese television crew follow her, reality TV-style, long before that genre ever became popular. Her 20-year career includes acting roles in movies and television shows — alongside Burt Reynolds in B.L. Stryker, 13 episodes of Miami Vice, appeared in Porky’s II and Alan Carr’s remake of Where the Boys Are. Her emotionally powerful fan dance marked her return to the stage in 2011, and her S&M themed act with Tigger! made the audience roar at the BHoF Weekender in 2012.   Are you performing at BHOF this year? Which night? Do you want to give us a hint about what you'll be doing? I am performing on Sunday night and will be doing a number with...

Before there was The Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender in Las Vegas, there was Exotic World on a goat farm in the desert in Helendale, California. There, performers such as Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Tigger, Miss Indigo Blue, and Kitten Deville, who at that time had been doing burlesque professionally for just a few short years, performed alongside Living Legends of burlesque whose careers spanned the 1940s-1970s. The living legends inspired new performers with their fierceness, their skills, and their story-telling. The performers who learned from them show a special fire and a rare sense of accessible humor mixed with high expectations of entertainment ability that created the new era of burlesque, in which these performers travel the world headlining festivals, media gatherings, and art events. Whether you are new to burlesque or an instructor, the Burlesque Hall of Fame Finishing School offers you the opportunity to add ...

About ten years ago I began a website called G-Strings Forever!, a tribute website to both strip joint strippers and burlesque. I was posting fuzzy digital photos of the scene I knew and setting up links and writing articles without the benefit of much site programming ability, and without blogging technology, flickr, or youtube. Inspired by the original Velvet Hammer website, I interviewed curfnt performers and burlesque legends. I wanted desperately to convey what was amazing and inspiring about these art forms and the people in them. Fortunately, as the School of Burlesque and The Burlesque Handbook have begun to keep me busier and busier, other, more able people have picked up that job, and one of the most inspiring is Holli-Mae Johnson, Editor-In-Chief of 21st Century Burlesque. Above: Holli-Mae, The Editor-In-Chief. How did you become interested in burlesque? Well, I suppose it was likely that, as a performer and with the friends and interests that I had, I would come across ...