The anatomy of burlesque: the embodied passion of Lindalee Tracey

TAKE ONE, March-June, 2004 by Kathleen Cummins

An ex-burlesquer herself, filmmaker Lindalee Tracey sashays us along with a lot of other bodies through a danse de ventre into the extraordinary arena of burlesque and its major movers and shakers in her latest documentary, The Anatomy of Burlesque. Tracey is a long way from the dark territory she travelled in her very personal, confessional film Abbey, I Hardly Knew Ya (1995), in which she led us into a downward spiral along skid row in a desperate search for information about her deceased father, an alcoholic who abandoned her as an infant.

Meticulously researched, her new film is a romp through the history of burlesque, narrated by those who practised the form. It combines the scholarly with the vernacular, mapping out the written and performed rites of burlesque; its high and low forms; its social meaning and physical components. It pays tribute to the icons of the genre, including Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Mata Hari, the French cancan, Lili St. Cyr, the Minsky brothers and Florenz Ziegfield. Although The Anatomy of Burlesque is a historical documentary chronicling the development and impact of burlesque on Western culture, the film still feels personal. For Tracey, it is personal. Burlesque is part of her soul, a soul that believes in the healing power of belly laughs and fart jokes, which is what essentially sets this film apart from most other historical documentaries. It's funny, it's smart, it's endearing and it's a little sassy too, a lot like Lindalee Tracey herself.

What inspired you to, in the words of Jonathan Miller, "unearth it all"?

It was the perfect intersection of where all the things that matter to me live. You know, in the land of burlesque. We've got to get over our uptightness. What I wanted was something joyous, smart and encompassing the high and the low. Boobs have been around forever. Potty humour has been around forever. And smart broads have been around forever. I wanted to put it all together and really enjoy the stew, so that's what I did. [Burlesque] was vulgar intentionally. It wasn't vulgar from lack of intelligence. It was a statement. I mean, who knew that the French cancan had revolutionary roots, and the dance is coded, physically coded? It's a language. It's a grammar among a group of people who say, "Fuck the cops, fuck the military, fuck the King!" I mean, it was incredibly defiant but coded so the dancers wouldn't all end up in the Bastille. The cancan is entertainment, but behind the entertainment is a much deeper and smarter meaning.

You mention in the film that you have a background in burlesque. How did you become a burlesque entertainer and how long were you on stage?

It was something I did for a few years a long time ago and made a great deal of money. I was truly a burlesquer a time when it was becoming much more about anatomy, and very little about burlesque. And so I was in that last little glow, that last hurrah when the big shows were still around and one could do comedy banter on stage. Then we all got pushed off the stage because of the incursions and assaults of pornography, and everything got reduced to body parts. Before that, one couldn't appear completely naked, so one had to resort to all kinds of imaginative and funny ways of keeping the audience engaged. It was a brilliant time. I wasn't really a stripper. I was always more of a burlesquer.

Although the film is fun and playful at times, it also tackles some very serious issues, mainly that of social inequalities and injustices, not unlike John Gay's 18th-century The Beggar's Opera, with its outrageousness and seeming vulgarity. How did you create the balance between the ludicrous and the serious?

It had a lot to with the casting of the film's subjects. It took a long time to get just the right group of people together because I really wanted to create a Greek chorus that had hinges, a Greek chorus that could laugh when laughter was necessary and that could reflect and guide when it was necessary. The notion was to create characters. We get a little bit into their lives, we get a sense of what they're doing and how they're connected to others, and every so often I break the rhythm and go back to the Greek chorus. So the casting was critical and took quite a long time to assemble. There are a great number of people out there who have all kinds of knowledge about burlesque, but not so many who have a bigger fluidity, a bigger range. Luckily enough we were able to assemble some pretty smart, interesting people who were also characters.

If I'm proud of anything in my life, besides a good marriage [Tracey's husband is the noted documentary producer Peter Raymont] and my sweet boy, it's casting Jonathan Miller [co-founder of Beyond the Fringe]. He really understood what I was trying to do with the film.

There seemed be such a wealth of information and archival material available on burlesque, which could be both a blessing and a curse. Can you talk about your approach to structuring and organizing the material?