It’s 3 am.
I’m awake. I am finishing putting bling on a costume.
The Amazon is burning.
The Great Barrier Reef is fucked up.
The world has 5 years to reverse the effects of climate change.
The Government is offering no leadership in this area.
What the fuck am I doing?
How many times must I ask myself this?
My first time on a striptease stage I had fallen to all new lows- driven by hunger, my unpaid rent and a burning desire to be onstage (even though I had no skill and no known talent). I chose the only avenue open to youthful arseholes like me. After all- who needs skill and talent? I had tits, an arse, long legs …and I had been told I was pretty by the girls at the convent… and I was brave… and I was aggressive… and like most punk members of lesbian girl gangs, I was a little anti-social… and you needed these things to be a stripper in those times because dancing wasn’t as much a prerequisite as being able to punch out the abusive, misogynist, yobbo fuck-knuckles that were our audience.
My mother had been a nudist, never ashamed of her naked body, often at the nude beach and always topless at other beaches- (you know when topless bathing was normal for all tit types, including my mother’s tit type- breastfed three kids and had an entire tit messing due to breast cancer), because showing off her mono-breast and having a huge hairy triangle was a great way to say ‘fuck you’ to men trying to objectify her beautiful self. Women in the seventies were braver than us.
I had been raised to be completely unashamed. In fact, it had always confused me why girls felt shy of their bodies- even before I had titties I would play in the ocean and be questioned by other shocked girls as to why I had no top on.
I’d screw up my nose- “because boys can, which means I can. Why are you wearing a top? You look dumb. Wearing a bikini top in the water when you have no tits IS dumb.”
They swam away.
I didn’t make friends easily.
So in stumbling out on to that first stage, in front of a full house of masturbating men, other than being struck by a cross-pollinated sense of how bizarre that room was and how ridiculous these men were, I couldn’t quell the noise in my head from one deafening thought “what the fuck am I doing?”.
It’s been thirty years since that first show. I’ve got a Bachelor degree in Performance Art, a Masters in Directing, a Diploma in Circus Skills, a diploma in film making, a diploma in Physical Fitness, am world-famous for what I do and spend my performing life travelling around the world taking off many layers of bejewelled, feathered costumes before sheiks and politicians, in a jet-set, glamorous whirlwind that makes most other performers dizzy.
In fact, I’ve just come home from Las Vegas where I performed my latest act- a protest piece – Porcelina of The Vast Oceans. Onstage, the lights were dazzling, my costume scintillated across my skin as I writhed and bumped and ground my hips. I transformed into seven species of sea-creatures only found on our reef. The audience gasped, applauded, screamed, cried, with tears rolling down their faces as they made their standing ovation.
At 48, I still am making waves in a field clutter with performers half my age, and all in mostly DIY costumes – each piece an artwork. No I don’t mean they are pretty- they are art- they say something other than ‘check out the socio-economic statement on this shit!” or ‘look a moeeee!” on Insta-sham.
And in between counting the beat, smiling, not mouthing the words to the Smashing Pumpkins song I am performing, as I shed layer after intricate layer, being careful not to become entangled in the skirts, making sure I throw the puppet far away enough so I don’t trip on it in the dance section, and being sure to pull the string with the bead on the end not the string with the button, to smile on the cymbal clash, to grind on the guitar solo and timing it perfectly so I open the skirt seam on the crescendo so the audience don’t hear the Velcro tear… I wonder- “what the fuck am I doing?”.
So in finding something to write to you about, I had many choices; the evolution of the G-string? 1001 ways to effectively make your Kmart bra look like a Dita Von Tease knock off or perhaps just about how my art seems to have lost purpose because I live in a dying world and refuse to accept that all I should be doing is entertaining people when my job is to kick society in it’s pretty, Invisaligned teeth- because if I don’t everything I have ever done, and all the change I have been a part of forming, has been a wasted effort and I am at a loss as to how to further inspire the generation that follow hot on my heels to really go for the political jugular and do what artists are really meant to do! CHANGE THE WORLD!
Let’s give the later a try…
Click here for Part 2 – ‘4 AM’.
Imogen Kelly
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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