Força – Burlesque, academy and scenes.
Burlesque performer and academic, Força, shares how “[burlesque] in itself is a popular form, a low brow form, so it's really about, and has always been about citing culture in an accessible way.” Força reflects on the nuanced burlesque scenes in Toronto, and how diverse performers navigate from small, to corporate scenes, and in between. Força raises questions about how COVID has impacted burlesque performance, venues; how traditions are evolving; and how we can uplift communities.
Links:
Coco Framboise (Nikola Steer)
Cherry Cola's Rock 'N' Rolla Cabaret Lounge
“The Function” (show) at El Mocambo
21st Century Burlesque Magazine
Transcript
Força: I go by both my stage name, which is Força, or Julia Matias, which is my legal name, and I'm pretty comfortable identifying that way whenever I'm not explicitly performing or doing something in community, or for only that community. I have been a performer for, I think it's now eight years. Yeah. And simultaneously with developing as a artist, I also started graduate school in a sort of more traditional academic program, and then I continued on to do a PhD where I write about burlesque performance. I focus on citational networks in burlesque, or feminist citational networks, which is really thinking about these kinds of central questions and things about what knowledges does a scene produce?
What are inherent knowledges that people within that smaller kind of scene, subculture, dynamic, whatever it might be, are very quickly taught or implicitly understood. Perhaps that's part of why they were attracted to participation in the first place, and also what sort of value systems are taught and ingrained in burlesque?
That's particularly important, I think, because that legacy is such an important part of the burlesque. Also, it's a form in itself that is a popular form, a low brow form, so it's really about, and has always been about citing culture in an accessible way. Often with the goal, I think it is more progressive iterations of unpacking some of those images or bringing them into a discourse.
It's basically references, right? It's knowledge systems or things that you're pointing to. I feel like maybe something that would be easier for folks who aren't as familiar with burlesque, and maybe you're interested in similar parallel art forms, and are familiar with drag or drag race. Citationality is also of paramount importance in drag, right?
You're addressing as pop culture figures, you're citing things in the world if you're hosting the show. It's that kind of stuff I'm talking about. Sometimes it's not as much explicitly about that. It is an art form that is typically about the core concete that it's about strip tease, but typically it can be about narrative, storytelling, it can be about excess and camp. So it's often the kinds of strip tease that can include but are not exclusive to things you might see in a strip club environment. Often there's a lot of room for sort of artistic play. It's typically both performed and audiences are populated by primarily women, queer folks, less of a sort of focus on a patriarchal, stereotypical straight, cis male audience that you might find coming to a strip club. And for that reason, audiences are also indoctrinated into understanding the logics of this form, typically. And that's an important aspect of it.
And I think developing in both fields at the same time really worked to co-inform each other. That eight year period was the majority of my twenties, so I also feel like I grew up through those two practices.
I'm not really sure where I would be now without having spent that really concentrated, for better, for worse. I'm critical of both of them in different ways, sometimes overlapping ways, but also I think that they've been great gifts.
It was interesting when you sent me a prompt about the Brian stuff. Firstly, it really drew to my attention, the fact that I write about scenes all the time. I'm citing people who are talking using the language of scene, queer cabaret scene, things like that. A lot of people were not defining the scene and it was actually quite difficult to find other places. I wanted to find some more stuff to support that, counteract that definition, whatever, and I think I was prompted to do that because I think I fundamentally disagreed with parts of it.
I feel like that part of it was a bit topic in a way that I see around a lot of writing around scenes, subcultures, things like that. And while I understand the value of that, and I think that part of it is true, I also think there are so many divergent dynamics in those places, so many kinds of different things happening that one sort of collective mentality. I don't think that often happens.
And I think in part of it is that there's a lot of attention and debate I found through my research, through my work. I should probably also mention while I work in the Toronto scene primarily, or I'm based here and I haven't traveled a ton since the first COVID outbreak, I used to tour and do a lot of festivals and have worked in a bunch of cities throughout the States and Canada and a bit in Europe, and many of us are connected online through social media platforms.
So we have a sense of what's going on other places and in most different areas of burlesque, there is this discussion around what to use to describe ourselves, whether it be scene, community, or industry, and I think often when the pressures of industry start to become a factor in people's logic, thinking, even ideologies around burlesque, around what a valuable career in can look like, around career at all in burlesque, it starts to break down, and break apart some of the things that he was maybe talking about,
For example, so the thing he says about mutual appreciation or motivational peer pressure, that I thought was interesting because I think I used to think that would be a bigger factor or certainly in the way is often marketed as this kind of body positive movement, as this movement about empowerment, about lifting each other up, like that exists in some ways, and I think it does still in classes, does still in more community-oriented scenes to a degree what (inaudible) 'Tial Call' and 'Jazarelle' call queer cabaret scenes, like these really small or trans feminist queer cabaret scenes.
But I think that kind of motivational peer pressure doesn't exist as you try to collect more bookings, extend your reach, et cetera, et cetera. What it ends up just being is keeping up with the Jones' kind of mentality, and so you start to create work in a way that is like what you think will be popular, viable, what has worked for others before, and less about creative innovation, so less about a DIY sort of sensibility that was so important and integral to early parts of the movement.
And I think that there are interesting things about that. There are interesting things about stepping up your game. This level of work people are creating, like great things can come out of it, but also a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure to, in this kind of neoliberal economy and culture, whatever. To travel anywhere, you can spend all the money you can on your costumes, rehearse, constantly rehash certain choreographies, or costuming elements that you see as valuable, even when it might not actually dramaturgically support the kind of piece that you initially set out to create. As I've moved on through this industry, or scene, or community, or whatever it might be in whatever application I'm working in it, I think that part of that, I've grown to question a lot, even as I recognize that I still, I'm a part of that myself, still take those considerations, um, into my work when I make something as well. Yeah. I don't know.
It depends on how you locate yourself as a performer, how you brand yourself, what your values are, where you want to work, for what pay rates, whatever. For example, I do like small scale shows when I can, small scale is a weird term, but things with a smaller audience, er pay rate, but has a particular kind of creative or political mandate I agree with is just fun and silly and I don't know, irreverent in a way that I love and I think is a really important attitude that certainly has carried over time. I like to oscillate between both of them, in part because I find them both creatively fulfilling in different ways and they're important to me, and it's important to me that I do both. There are some folks who only work in one or the other, I think for some reasons, that are pretty particular to, like particularly important to know.
So some folks only have marketed themselves, whatever it might be, to get those like high paid, more industry level clients, cultivate a particular look in their costuming possibly. And very often have a particular kind of body type, are read racially a particular certain way, often, et cetera, et cetera, are usually cisgendered women.
Um, and they, they curate that kind of career. It's important to know that some people who work in the sort of more, let's say, underground, it's not really underground, but let's say like small, smaller scene based, really like foreign by community shows that are typically more political, more creatively go all over the map, often are less well funded, so costuming isn't as expensive, et cetera, et cetera.
Many of those performers work there either because that's the kind of work they're completely interested in creating. Often this is just true across the board, but also many of those performers cannot achieve the same level of high industry clout that other folks might be able to, in part because of the myth and political factors that their work is often about.
Things like how your body is read in the world, things like how your class might be presented. There are sort of barriers spoken or unspoken that often limit their ability to work in what we often in the industry call more corporate spaces and can sometimes also affect how they move through the festival market. Although I think that a lot of us come out of people with those ethos who are also performers and producers have been more mindful about that. Certainly in the last, I would say at least five years, maybe a bit longer, and it's been ever more developing. But those are all things to consider.
Festivals typically are unfunded, so you go there, perform your work with the goal of advancing your career, uh, or because it's simply fun for you, or there aren't stage spaces like that. It's like a real lighting rig, the whole nine yards in your local community, and you wanna utilize that. But often it's really about being with community from other places, learning a scene and trying to network with the way that it was always - let's start with this: it was always an unsustainable financial model for many people with the sort of ravages- economic ravages, COVID has had on lots of people, particularly performing artists, people who do gig work, et cetera, et cetera. Those have become, and the prices of plane tickets and gas and travel of any kind, that's become incredibly unsustainable for even more people.
It's been really interesting to see how those things are starting up. I, at least in my worldview, I've seen a little bit less participation. I myself have been weary of going back out there and doing all of that again and when I have done a few, I've been really selective about it, just based on what I could offer and the kind of levels of burnout I was at from really hitting that scene hard before and finding myself at a loss for it, except for the fact that a lot of the sort of messaging is to just keep doing that until something comes of it. But that's for many real people, hard to do, particularly when I was working on a dissertation, and a bunch of other stuff. So there's that. Corporate gigs, singly, so corporate gigs, corporate proper, like a corporation or company is hiring you for like their party or something like that, right?
Or like that kind of thing. Private bookings, et cetera, et cetera. Usually this is someone from outside the community who has very little knowledge about the values of burlesque, has maybe seen aesthetics around somewhere and thinks it might be a nice addition to their party. Sometimes they have to be told that involves strip tease off the top, et cetera, et cetera. Those have ebbed and fed a lot. When I started, there was a lot of them in part, I think there were some performers who were really good at doing that outreach who were working. Then, Coco Framboise, namely was one of them. I remember. She really generously brought me in. She did excellent work, both artistically in the more sort of art space type shows, and in the corporate sphere. And she was really good at mobilizing throughout them. She now, her name is Nicola Steer, she now does a bunch of really cool sort of installation work and multimedia work. So I saw a lot of that through her.
And then it would wax and wane and go down nightclubs on King West in Toronto. Very like what you might think of as like a nightclub district. Would sometimes have get shows and just want you to dance around to top 40 for four minutes. They've ebbed and fed as well. Recently there have been more corporate bookings.
They come every so often, not all of the time, but for a higher pay rate. And I think those were what I was describing, but they're typically pretty, not all, but some companies obviously have maybe a more inclusive mandate or something and they want to book anyone. But often those kind of, I don't know, prejudices, let's say are applied to shows.
Those are happening a little bit. At least I've noticed. But in terms of on the scene level, a lot of the really neo shows that Toronto has been so known for, I think a really long time since, since the beginning of the scene. But in different ways, like the sort of nerd less or really pop culture based shows, what we'll call a community show - what I call community show is buy-in for the community.
So often most people who attend it are also performers, or adjacent in some way. Usually in these shows, acts that are invited, you can pretty much do anything you want so you can have any sort of aesthetic, any kind of narrative, or not narrative, whatever you like. Sometimes there are themes, but usually they're a little bit more open that way, or a lot of shows that are for specific marginalized communities, femme fatale is still going pretty strong.
Kage Wolfe did a show for BIPOC audiences for, sorry, performers and audiences at the Gladstone. Beyond those two, a lot of the other shows that were catered to that really neo part of the neo scene have stopped happening, in part just because people moved on, producers stopped producing, venues closed.
Cherry Colas was like the weekly spot in Toronto for many years, and though it's almost closed many times, it finally did eventually throughout COVID lockdowns and the consequences of that, so we lost kind of those spaces where there was a lot of creative experimentation happening. What has come up instead, because a sort of different group of producers have started really making work, are shows that are much more what we call classic burlesque, or glamorous aesthetic.
They're performed to, many of them are performed to live music, which is really exciting. There wasn't much movement like that in Toronto before. It's nice to see. Many of them are a really improv based, at least in part. So the idea is that you're coming in and you're riffing with the band and all.
That's really exciting and really draws from the history of mid-century of in a really cool way. But it means that there aren't as many spaces to do really conceptual numbers in the city and also different people are being hired because of basically like who the producers like to work with, what their kind of talent base is, who they already know a work a particular kind of way.
All those kinds of things that always have played into how bookings happen. So it's interesting to see how gifted, as many people have either decided that pursuing to the degree they were before wasn't the right fit for them or have been forced to stop, and how those kinds of cards have moved around.
Something I think that's been really cool about it though is that some of the new shows that are happening have really made it such a wonderful job of outreaching to other parts of the art scenes in Toronto. Like really thinking about making relationships with musicians and making relationships with their networks of musicians.
Thinking about small venue owners who are starting something up, and how to build a really exciting event together. A great example is the show I've been doing a lot called The Function. It's a live band show, it happens at the renovated El Mocambo, it's been really fun. There's a house band they've introduced, you know, the producer through them or through her. Their own networks knows other folks. They're starting a new show at, I think it's called The Black Pearl. There's a great show at Tapestry, which is run by two Armenian brothers. They do a really, a lot of really interesting sort of music programming. And cocktails and stuff like that. So it's been cool to see that happening, and I think that's something we've wanted for a long time.
And I hope that, I guess like more advanced or extended network of support continues to be fostered. 'Cause I think that might be how we survive and get through this together.
So certainly like I'm no longer new - I'm no longer treated like I'm new. Sometimes that can be really flattering or lovely to go to a new place, and say someone's seen, they might work already, and they liked it, or that I've met a lot of, there's a lot of familiar faces when I go to festivals or events, or the convention in Seattle, et cetera.
It's nice that I'm not everyone, I'm not like a macro level performer, but like a well enough known person traveling a lot and through doing events like the Call of Fame. I think that's probably primarily how that happened. In Toronto, there were a few new people who were starting out.
There certainly are, I think already even a couple generations of newer performers than when I started out. I think I came in at a really interesting and strange kind of tumultuous time. There definitely were like heavy hitters in burlesque, who in Toronto anyway, who were like the dominant producers, who at that time there was still a burlesque, like an established school that was housed at an actual building you could go to. So there was a much more clear path for many folks to get into the scene that way. But all of those kind of key players primarily don't produce in the city anymore or, yeah, almost never, give or take a few small shows. So other people have come up through different instructors, have come up through different networks, and certainly before COVID there were different places for some of those folks to perform.
There was a really great trans and non-binary cabaret that used to happen at the Gladstone. So some people, like my good friend 'Moak', was doing some of their first really interesting numbers there. Since COVID, though, or people like 'Red Song Raven's', a new performer and she's, I think, came through maybe the last school that Toronto burlesque, just some classic other stuff. There were newer performers. Some of those people had said that the first show they saw in Toronto I was in. So that's cool. It's a cool like thing to be a part of, to be someone's influence in a way. Since COVID, there have not been many new performers and I think that might be, again, it's like one of the losses that comes with not having many community spaces.
There is actually, I should mention, there's one show like that. It's called Bootleggers Burlesque. It's by a producer named A’Slayna Von Hunt. She also produces a show to champagne bar. More of that kind of, somewhere between an industry corporate thing. Not exactly, but it's fun, but it's a different kind of environment.
This show is very much, it's a floor show, but you can do what you want. And I think that she's actually set aside one act per performance for a newer performer who's been performing for under two years. And there are some who have been really incredible and have been kitten-ing our shows, which is often the way that you'd learn the ropes despite, you're like the pickup artist who picks up all the, not in the gross way. You pick up the discarded items and you bring them back in. Like a really fun, flirty stage hand. I dunno. And they've started doing a little bit of work.
But I think right now in Toronto, it's very hard to establish yourself. Even I'm finding it hard to find places to do signature numbers. I love working in improv environments. It's my two favorite ways to work are like that, or to spend a lot of time and really develop with whatever resources I have a particular big scale number usually suitable for a large stage. There are very few places to perform that kind of work here right now. In the last year and a bit where I have done that is in Montreal, 'cause they have a designated venue, they also have a school and some of the performers I've spoken to from there, who I'm sure could speak to this better than I could have talked about, also, the school is churning out new students every season and what that means for the scene and how they support them. They do have, again, a venue that does burlesque. I think it's four or five nights a week, so they can support a bit more of that work.
But there's also a sense of there being a lot of people coming out at once, and in different phases of my career. That was happening around when I was developing a few years after and then once after that. When there's a lot of people instructing in a sort of 1 to 1 format, there tends to be a lot of people who are looking to book stage time, that kind of thing.
The lived experience of going through both scenes is actually quite similar, sometimes in a very daunting way, when you're an independent contractor. Not exactly, but basically you're constantly trying to establish yourself and prove yourself. Most of that is uncompensated or vastly undercompensated.
There's never a point where you feel secure, like you've got it and you're going and it's good. There's really, there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of kind of trying to accrue with accolades. It doesn't have to happen in either, it doesn't have to happen in burlesque. I actually think if you want to work in academia, you're suits a degree, but it often does.
And that pressure, and they're both schemes, let's say, where you could always be doing more. And that again, doesn't have to be the mentality you take to them, but is subtly pitched, I think in a lot of ways, whether or not people realize it. In terms of differences between them or approaches to them, I've had a difficult time through academia.
I'm grateful for it from, in many ways, I think critically in a way I maybe wouldn't have, had I not undergone this process. I think I've gotten to read a lot, and meet a lot of people, have a lot of really interesting contexts and experiences, but I've often found it obfuscatious, and not in terms of, oh, the articles are written in obfuscatious language, but rather that there's this secret knowledge of how to orient your career or move through things that is not clearly or directly presented at any time, and that it's almost like you're walking, but you can't see the forest through the trees, but you'll run into a few people who have their own ideas of it, and it's only a part of the picture.
That's often how I felt through it. And while I think that can exist in too, I think that it's open and loosey-goosey, and in some ways there is this kind of festival trajectory. You can do it if you want, or you can do anything else. I think also academia, again, that obfuscatious nature of, at least in my field, which is I primarily performance studies, but even gender studies things I also engage with.
While you're trained to be more rigorous, the picture of what that looks like, I found initially hard to grapple with, especially because you're being presented with that at the same time as you're being presented with really traditional scholarship that had clear format as to what makes a good publication, article, book, et cetera.
So I ended up figuring out in a roundabout way that I wrote best when I wrote more like a creator who was talking about their friends than I did, like what I thought an academic had to sound like. It was really hard for me to figure that out. Maybe it shouldn't have been, but often I felt like I'm just like trying to figure out what I'm doing and I've come to really great places, I have grown a lot, but I wish, I sometimes wish that there was just a different mode of instruction that wasn't so isolating, that wasn't like interspersed conversation with vast amount of empty alone time to work in between. I think I'm writing my dissertation now, finally finishing this year, and it's because I'm having weekly meetings with my supervisor and also started seeking help for ADHD.
But part of that is interesting too. Like I feel like so many artists have that, 'cause everyone I know does, I think, but I've always thought so, especially in burlesque, lots and lots of folks are neurodivergent, and I think that's also a key thing I'd want to talk about between the two scenes, because it really does encourage you to do things any way that makes sense to you to create the final product. So there's no sense of, what's the word I'm looking for? Virtuosity. In the same way there might be in ballet or music or whatever, it really is in its own way, an amateur art form. Not to say that people aren't highly trained or maybe actually professionals in other elements of performing arts that they bring in, but that you starting in this field can go any way you want, and you do not need to be an expert. There is no way to be an expert going into it.
And so for me as a person who now identifies as neurodivergent and really struggled with choreography in the traditional ways, it was taught, learning, even like taking direction, particularly if it would move too fast, or if it would not make sense to me, but knew that I was really good at making that kind of work in a devised setting, when I had equal say, or that if I was given more time that I could produce the product that was required of me, even excel at it.
Sometimes this is a working format that works really well for me, because it als me to work the way I work, and also trust my instincts in a way that was sometimes hard to explain to other people, and that is a skill that I've had some difficulty transferring over to the academy, for sure. I think one of the core and most important things that is undermined too in the scene, but I think maybe is happening more there, or can happen in a way that doesn't, academia, both of them, can sometimes overemphasize this idea of like individualized genius.
This idea that to be a valuable performer or scholar, you are publishing a lot, all the time. They are sole publications. I don't agree with this, but there's sometimes talk in burlesque, or talk about folks who have their acts choreographed for them, who aren't doing it themselves, who are using this and that or buying that, or they're sometimes guilted about over-relying on outside observers in your process, not being able to do it on your own.
And I think that's not the way we create, and not the way that we think. As a scholar, that's been like a primary interest of mine as I've moved through this kind of training, thinking about research ethics and recognizing that we are citing artists who have thought so thoroughly about what they're putting on stage, are bringing in all these networks of knowledge with them, that they're carrying with them through this piece.
And so we need to hold them up as partners any way we can, and we need to make sure they're comfortable with whatever is being written, even if that takes longer, even if that means we get less publications out. And even if as a performer, if that means we do less so that we can actually be there for people, or for community or make decisions that are based on thought and care, because I think we're, the good artists are doing that anyway in their work. They're really thinking about the intentionality of what they're doing, and often it's really good. I think my dissatisfaction comes in both arenas when there is no room made for that and you're told to just keep going, and like you did it yourself, which is impossible.
Keeping up with the Jones', yeah. Keeping up with, and it's like almost trying to best. For example, there's a top 50 list in burlesque. It's done by popular vote on this publication called 21st Century Magazine. And every year it's contested, it causes a lot of emotions for people about where they rank on it. If they don't make it again, why they'll never make it, it's things like that important to recognize folks it doesn't, I don't think it's a helpful metric in part because if you're like an influencer and you have a huge foling that have never been to a show, you could just ask them to vote for you and then that's possible, like how are we quantifying what value looks like? Especially the value isn't face forward. I think that's really important too. I think the only thing I would add is yeah, I was reading something in prep for this and I thought this idea was really beautiful. It's from an author called T.L. Cowan. She's on the committee, she writes, about queer cabaret a lot and works with her partner 'Jasmine Rowles' often, and in this article, I think it's partially collectively written, but she talks about how the collective, we're thinking about the sort of the small world making, or sorry, the world making that scholars are always talking about happening in queer nightlife spaces, like how valuable that is transformative and safe.
But they add, in actuality, that's not happening because they're not changing the world around them. What they're making in those moments is a kind of small world. So it's a small world making exercise. It's a little place. And I wonder if in burlesque, in these kinds of shows I've described, there are little places, particular shows where we're seeing particular kinds of people with particular kind of commitments and certain types of work on stage.
That might be a great framework to think about sort of scene culture moving forward. Where is the small world, and when is it not that small?
Jacob Zimmer: Thanks very much for listening. You can find out more at nakaitheatre.com/podcast where there's links and transcriptions. Thanks to the Government of Canada through the Department of Heritage for funding this cycle of the podcast in which we discuss how to be together and thrive as live performance makers.
Stay well.