Burlesque is a performance that was created with caricature and parody to mock by being a humorous comedy with an added sexual essence. In real meaning, you could call burlesque a risqué performance art. In the entertainment form burlesque has been use as poetry, verse, theatrical comedy and more currently as adult entertainment. There are also amateur enthusiasts in a secretive underground burlesque scene. Burlesque has been subject to a lot reticule across the country, but it is still evolving cross-cultural today. A lot of the burlesque forms are distinctively different from each another. Burlesque today has developed into a wide range of artistic, musical, and literary styles within it catering to many different tastes and disciplines from classical to contemporary.
Classical Burlesque, one of the earliest works of burlesque came from Aristophanes, a poet-philosopher, a comic dramatist. Aristophanes had a highly influential personality whose lewd burlesques intended to challenge everything and everyone in ancient Athens. He mocked and spoofed their icons with his performances he played out in riddles with insight and comments, much to the pleasure of the Athenian people who saw respect and truth in humor. Many thought Aristophanes’ with his influence and power could be fatal. Aristophanes was named the Father of Comedy, Aristophanes’ burlesques were comical plays written in a poetic style. The plays were full of figurative language, wisecracks and jousting most of which is lost in translation today. Most of the classical burlesques were intended to be read while others were performed in theatre settings.
In these early burlesques works they were preformed on stage with characters based on real people with real issues. The c...
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...endly’ and cleaner than they once were. Today, people are enjoying going out for live entertainment experimenting with personal style and nurturing the latent theatrical desires within are in fact a new lifestyle for many.
Burlesque theatre was always been risqué and even downright lewd at times, but is an empowering form for women reclaiming their sexual identities. The classical reinterpretations of the theatrical form in different parts of the world show a fascinating diversity of culture reflecting both social history and national tastes. In Great Britain, the art of classical burlesquing has remained relatively unchanged in 200 years and its history is steeped in powerful social change. In fact, technically speaking, burlesquing has been going on for as long as the first person sought to entertain another and will continue to entertain people in the future.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 11 May 2011.
The term Burlesque is usually thought of as slightly naughty theatre produced and performed between the 1890s and World War II. Webster defines it as a literary or dramatic work that seeks to ridicule by means of grotesque exaggeration or comic imitation, mockery usually by caricature or theatrical entertainment of a broadly humorous often earthy character consisting of short turns, comic skits, and sometimes striptease acts. Today Burlesque has no meaning as a contemporary phenomenon to most Americans. Burlesque is far from the commonplace twentieth century definition. The background, rise and fall of American Burlesque takes place in less then forty years. The entertainment known as Burlesque has had many different types of audiences. It has entertained all classes of people.
Over the course of instruction, I have gathered an understanding that Burlesque differs from other kinds of strip-tease in it’s humor and current commentary, sometimes specifically on social or political situations. The theoretical portion of the performance was the most entertaining part--the performance portion was a bit more difficult for me. As a sexual assault survivor, on-stage vulnerability (particularly involving the removal of clothing) will always been a challenge for me, but incorporating my feelings about those kinds of situations made the exercise more plausible. While any commentary on physical sexual assault is a long way off for me, other components (specifically verbal) are still a source of tension among society at large.
In “The Old Acrobat,” the flanuer is lured by the naturalistic and crude appearances of the street performers caused by society’s need for abstract stimulation. The acrobat is physically and mentally drained from performing straining and exhausting tasks for the gratification of others. The dominant scent at the carnival is “a frying odor”2 which hints that the performers are sacrificing themselves and literally “frying” their souls away to satisfy their hungry audiences. Even the acrobat is described as being “illuminated all too well by two burned-down candles”3 which are “dripping and smoking.”4 There is a sense of...
Sarah Bernhardt’s acting style, along with her exotic and alluring lifestyle led her to be slightly ostracized in the French Theatre. French styles of acting at the time were said to be “monotonous, rigid and too codified” and followed strict guidelines in accordance with the French acting academies (Pauk). In France,
In his published lecture concerning Aristophanes' plays, Cedric H. Whitman discusses what he considers as the general template of all of Aristophanes' main characters: the comic hero. Whitman defines a comic hero as possessing great individualism, a good deal of poneros, meaning wickedness, and striking a balance of eiron and alazon, which translates into being a mixture of an ironical buffoon, who makes fun of himself for his own amusement, and an imposter, who disguises his true identity or feelings. He sees the comic hero as one who is extremely self-motivated and self-centered: "whatever is heroic is individualistic, and tends toward excess, or at least extremes. It asserts its self primarily . . ." Whitman also declares that poneros is necessary in the character of the comic hero, that this person is villainous, manipulative, and very convincing. The comic hero is shameless in expressing his desires, and he has no shame in pursuing them by any means necessary, whether such acts would be considered right or wrong. Whitman also recognizes the mixture of eiron--ironical buffoonery--and alazon--being an imposter--in the comic hero of Aristophanes' plays. "The mere buffoon, says Aristotle, makes fun for the sake of getting a laugh for others; the ironical man makes fun for his own amusement, which is more worthy of a free man.
Aristophanes and Menander had different preoccupations. Menander's comedy has been described as "a serious attempt at light drama". His is a Comedy of Manners, with a great deal of emphasis on morals and also on piety. `Old Cantankerous' is universally accessible, and Menander did not only write for the Athenian audience. Aristophanes, however got caught up in whichever problem Athens was experiencing at the time. This meant that it must have been biting wit , but for anyone who was not an Athenian at that time would need some background knowledge to understand many of the jokes and references.
Imagine being in the middle of New York City, purchasing center orchestra seats to the opening of a brand new musical comedy for that evening. Hours pass and you are running late, and are rushing through the streets. You arrive just in time to hear the orchestra begin to warm up and soon the lights dim, and the curtain, ever so slowly, begins to rise. As the actors appear on stage you notice something odd about the way they all look. Everyone on stage is dressed in overalls and straw hats, and all of their faces are smeared with black greasepaint.
A satirical comedy is an attempt to ridicule a certain aspect of government, religion, or another aspect of society to bring about change through the use of comedy to lighten the blow. Tartuffe is a prime example of a satirical comedy. Molière used this play to point out one of the biggest flaws of organized religion during his time, religious hypocrisy. Although he may not have directly intended it to be about the Catholic Church, it was interpreted by them as such so they made the king ban it for a period of time. By making it into a play, Molière was able to reach a larger audience. People tend to enjoy plays more so due to their quick, lively nature. Plays are always changing, and they are stories being brought to life. A reader may not be interested by a short story or novella, but a play could be the very thing to draw in their attention. Molière was able to reach more people by making this into a play, therefore making the problem of religious hypocrisy more widely
It has further been stated by Bakhtin that Carnivalesque bodies were involved in the use of absurd or laughter in or...
Theater was loved by all, and not just because most of the population of Athens was celebrating with drink and song, but because the performances of the plays had created entertainment and inspiration for many other play writers out there. Sophocles created around 123 plays, however only seven have survived. The tragedies that Sophocles had written happened to have a strong focus on the relationships between man and the gods, or man and nature. One of his most famous plays happened to be the Oedipus Rex, where the people of Thebes have been plagued with pestilence and Oedipus seeks to serve the gods. This was one of his most famous plays however it never won in the competition of Dionysia because he had believed that it was too ahead of his time. He was a very serious man and his tragedies had portrayed his personality. Aristophanes however, was known to be a goofball and also one of the greatest comedians of his time. During his lifetime he had written almost forty-four plays, with eleven surviving today. The plays that he had written made fun of just about anybody, it didn’t matter the sex or status of the people in the plays. This is shown by his play Lysistrata, where a female Athenian woman happens to take over the acropolis and assumes the position that is known for men only in means to end the Pelloponisian war. Unfortunately his sense of humor did not sit well with everyone, this can be assumed because he had only placed first in the competition of Dionysia three times. Sophocles and Aristophanes were considered genius’s because of their ability to create such amazing works of art through theater. And still to this day they are inspiring students of theater because there are several modern reenactments of their
Laurie Essig observed that the Burlesque industry was booming in the 1920’s to 1930’s when the striptease was developed (Essig 2007, 199). This added to the comic relief of critiquing pretentious bourgeois culture. But Burlesque didn’t last long within the United States, when the Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City, “managed to shut down the remaining Burlesque theaters by 1937.” Because nudity wasn’t considered an art form, Burlesque and pornography were yet to be seen as socially acceptable. During the midst of the theater shutdowns, Burlesque dancers started following another career path in the “film industry” (Essig 2007, 199).
... a way for audiences and performers to connect on a closer level. They are both experiencing the surreal, disassociating themselves from the performance taking place. They both become more introspective. The performance becomes a vehicle for self-understanding, metacognition.
Theatre History II Garic Tinsley Dr. Jennifer Stoessner 5/6/2014 Theatre in Prison: A Viable Engine for Rehabilitation and Social Change Prison within the society in America has sharply veered towards the idea of mass incarceration. The Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) is a criminal research group that reports on the quantity of people in the United States that are in the prison system, and in 2014 “PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons” (J.F. 1). This number is cause for concern when compared to a study of recidivism released among thirty states in 2005 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
Aspects of physical theatre we hope to explore are: Mime, gesture, status, proximity, stance, harshness and tenderness, dance, grotesque, image and