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burlesque 1

By Steve Hopkins

A traveling college-based performing troupe called Alpha Psi Ecdysia is busily re-introducing the nearly lost art of burlesque to audiences from New Paltz to New York City and beyond. The group, led by a long-term student code-named Lucida Sans (a moniker she shares with an obscure printing font), is nearing 50 strong these days and includes both men and women in its ranks. They put on a rousing full-length, three-act show last month at Joe’s East/West in New Paltz.
I caught up with Ms. Sans recently, and she got me up to speed on what’s happening with the neo-burlesque movement that began in New York City in the late 1990s, and which she took up in earnest in 2006, as she was finishing high school. “Neo-burlesque is about taking the classic striptease beyond mere titillation and into storytelling. Yes, it routinely involves the shedding of clothes, but the stripping is employed in the service of a three-minute-long character portrait. A routine can be humorous; or it can be sad. It can be beautiful or horrific. It can be uplifting or downright sick. But it always strives to be sexy in some way.”

Sans got into burlesque as an extension of her love for avant garde theater. “I had been a performer of another kind, you know, with traditional actor training,” she says. “I was always into the avant garde, and also really into physical theater of various kinds, specifically the Polish Laboratory Theatre, really gritty, visceral stuff. My interest had always been sort of using the body for storytelling. So doing burlesque was kind of a natural departure, actually.”

The New Paltz show featured women and men of wildly varying physicality, performing a wide array of theatrical clothes-shedding. There were fan dancers, fire dancers, nurses, schoolgirls, theatrically violent knife- and chainsaw-wielding punks, religious figures, and caricatures of emcee icons. There was a magician, who extricated himself from a reasonably secure-looking hogtying job performed by a couple of surly-looking audience members.

Audience surliness, it seems, is apparently de rigueur. “Yes, there were hecklers,” says Sans. “There are always hecklers – I like them. They’re a throwback to another era when that was an acceptable form of feedback. So I dig that. Because they’re being nostalgic in the same way we are. Plus, you know, we need the feedback.”

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For More Photos from A Night at the Burlesque, CLICK HERE

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

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