(Click here for Part 1 – ‘3 AM’)
Firstly: What is art?
When I talk about art, I don’t mean pretty, inane shit. I acknowledge that there is an art to making pretty, inane shit, but beyond that, the audience walks away with nothing other than a burnt retina from being forced to endure your over-sparkled arse. I also feel that almost anyone can make pretty, inane shit and I don’t agree that all of it has a place.
What you want to create is something that they take home with them in their minds- their hearts. Something they think of the next day, the next week, months to come, or even until they die.
Great art can do this. Great art takes risk. Burlesque, drag and circus are possibly the greatest places to take risk either for social reasons or physical. So already you have chosen to perform an art that innately carries an amount of risk with it. Why stop there?
The greater the risk in a piece, the more political it can be because if you are good, you take your audience with you into a territory they might personally fear to tread. All people have fear. You are their guide through that inner space, if you win their confidence they will trust you like children, and in taking them somewhere even wolves fear to tread, they thank you for it with applause, you are making art. You are making change because your time onstage has changed how people feel. You have shifted their spirit somehow.
You have to know a lot about your own person before you know how to push yourself into taking great personal risk. Just because I adorn my art with sparkles doesn’t mean I don’t gently nudge people from their comfort zone.
You can be sure I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone in taking that piece onstage. Depending on the demographic I perform to, I tailor the nudging.
To know in which direction to nudge I always look to where I am hurting the most, or receiving the most joy. I know others are either joyful or hurting in the same way, and in communicating with them through my art, it is a balm for them. They know they are not alone. For the 7-mins I orchestrate my audience, I bring people together to collectively feel something, and my work communicates a ‘something’ that is innately female. Why? Why fucking not?
The syringe helmet act with my own hand painted body suit – photos by John Boy Dennis. 2000. 
The syringe helmet act with my own hand painted body suit – photos by John Boy Dennis. 2000.
When I started performing there were no real spaces for women to perform- unless of course, we were up for being told what to wear, what to say, when to be onstage. Women were decoration, love interests and mothers scripted for and by men. Even to get those roles we had to be a name, and to be a name it seems you had to either be incredibly talented, incredibly lucky, or just suck a lot of cock.
It seemed men had the entire performing industry stitched up, even the slipstreams of drag and cabaret. To be fair, even for those of us born with balls the opportunities were limited if you were ‘too unique’. My mentors were all in this category- rebellious mothers, trans, or drag, or I was too scared to even ask because it didn’t even matter what was going on between their legs. We were gutterlings, the seam of gold running through the beige sandstone of Sydney.
Thankfully we had Punk! Glorious punk. I am sure many think of fashion when they think of punk, or spotty youths in torn clothes and safety pins through their noses- but no. Punk was not a fashion movement, punk was the mother of us all.
Punk was a political movement and one that was greatly feared. It was a movement where children inheriting a shit world just simply turned their backs on their inheritance. They turned away from society, they didn’t want to anything to do with it, they didn’t want to inherit anything- there were too many oppressive rules involved. They were going to destroy the world by destroying themselves. Live fast, die young and leave a disinterested corpse. They broke the rules, all rules, and that included the rules of getting onstage.
They decided they didn’t need formal training to get onto the stage, they didn’t even need to be good. In fact, the more shit they were, the more they were loved, because what they gave in the place of training was high voltage commitment. They created their own stages, and when they weren’t out bleeding on their broken, out of tune instruments or cutting themselves up with glass, they created music that became a global meeting place, and all you had to do to join in was stop being a part of the machine, and listen.
So I guess step one in my 3 (or 4) am list of things that made me, it was when I stepped off the merry-go-round decided to not be a part of the machine.
Do you know you can do this too? It’s hard to tell people that are so deeply hooked in that they should unplug and just let go. It’s as if there is a fear our existence might collapse like a puppet with cut strings if we do… but when you are making art, and you use your own body, you are both puppet and puppeteer… So stop handing over your strings. Considering that so many of you are only just starting your journey, why aren’t you all using your stage time to simply scream? This is your time to be young on this planet and you are being robbed of it. I feel like screaming. My art feels like a scream, only I’ve mastered my antagonism to the point people listen. There’s a lot of padding softening the blows I deal. I think I’m going back to the zero-padding version of my art and heading back to creating punk-inspired gatherings.
It was on the ethos of a post-Punk world that Australian short format performance platforms were formed. Not that we were violent, but rather it was the essence of what punk was doing that created puncture holes in society’s killing jar. Punk tore apart the establishment and tore tradition from its command post.
We were tired of traditions. They were stifling. We were furious with older generations. We wanted somewhere to explode. Don’t you want that for yourselves? I often wonder why the youth of today aren’t exploding all over the place… there’s so much to explode about… hmmm … surely you are angry. Let me help you light the fuse.
When I think of GenX- the generation that came to performance in the aftermath of the decimation of closed art, I think how hard we had to still work to come from the outside of society and make room for ourselves.
Even though our faces are now aging, and our bodies are weakening, and fewer of us are onstage, I’ll only ever see wildling when I see a Gen X performer.
Sure the walls were torn down, but making a new world did not come with an instruction manual. Like-minded artists had to be found, spaces had to be found, audiences had to be built, audiences had to be reached by word of mouth, audiences had to be taught, rules had to be made, traditions reintroduced, laws had to be adjusted for the misaligned freak children fighting for air in a still conservative world.
Somehow it all got there – one inch at a time – and we knew things would be easier for the generations that followed.
Sometimes, I’m not sure we did you any favours – perhaps things are too easy now. Is good art forged without the pressure of adversity? Is your world so padded that you’re not feeling… and if you do you either stare a screen for comfort or start bitching online that something/one hurt your feelings and you weren’t up for feeling because you’re sick of constantly feeling… so you tear them apart.
Personally, I blame the Care Bears. There was something very sinister about that show/ toy combo. So much softening… If you grew up watching Care Bears you may have been subliminally programmed to expect everyone to have rainbows across their chests. Newsflash- no one is ‘nice’. In fact, I find ‘nice’ people entirely terrifying. But then I also have an inexplicable hatred for Elton John… I’m not sure the Care Bears still pose a real threat to your emotional development. My point is something happened between generations, I only wish I could pinpoint what.
Could it just simply be that later generations of artists never saw descent in action? Or is it that circus, burlesque and drag have slowly became appropriated by the middle class…
Question: Would I have ever become a great artist without all of the adversity I faced? Would I have ever refined this strange art that I do and honed it as a very delicate, soft, visceral weapon if I had not learned to identify there was a war, and learned to call to arms potential allies.
Hmmm- so, rather than impart how to glue sparkles to your crotch, or how to deliver the immaculate classic glove peel, I’d rather impart how very powerful art can be, and hopefully inspire you to put antagonism at the heart of your performance and in doing so stir your audience to shift, not just in energy, but in heart.
Art is powerful because we rarely need words to communicate and as such we can reach anyone, anyone at all, and our audiences gather around us because sure, they want to be distracted and they want to smile, and laugh and be dazzled before they go back to stressing about their mortgage, or their divorce, or their loneliness and depression, but our audiences in this time need to know it is ok to be angry, and it is normal to be entirely freaked out by climate change and we are the ones who should be creating those gathering points. We are supposed to be leading them- if even for just 7 minutes.
Change doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Change comes from humans gathering, and our stages are an altar of hope around which humans still gather.
This is just an introduction. My future articles will explore examples in history of how short format performance has changed the world, with a focus on good old dirty burlesque.
It’s your world now. Time is ticking. Stop being so damn pretty.
Imogen x
Imogen Kelly – Contributing Writer
Imogen Kelly is Australia’s first lady of striptease not only renowned as Australia’s Queen of Burlesque but also crowned World Queen of Burlesque in 2012 (Burlesque Hall of Fame, Las Vegas).
She is an acclaimed performance artist, writer, director and producer. Her theatre shows include The Undressing Room (Solo), Herstory (Solo), Mr Monster (Family Variety) and Tarnished (La La Parlour- circus troupe).
Pic: Liz Jen
Check out more about Imogen on her WEBSITE
Follow her on FACEBOOK
Read more of her awesome writing including chapters of her book ‘A Bad Girls Guide to Revolution’ @ burlesquebeat.com – New York’s Burlesque Beat Magazine.
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