Posted at the Tutto Theatre blog, February 26, by David Glen Robinson:
I have been wanting to write this blog for a long time. I have been a fan of members of the Jigglewatts burlesque troupe since before they were Jigglewatts. They tour nationally now, and occasionally overseas, So tonight’s show (actually two performances--at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.) was somewhat of a rarefying opportunity to see them in Austin. So I reserved a VIP table and showed up at the venue with time to spare.
OK, stop You. I didn’t go to a strip show or to a “gentlemen’s club.” The Jigglewatts perform a new and rising form of alternative performance that I call New Burlesque. It borrows from your grandmother’s vaudeville burlesque, yes, but it also adds to that certain new forms such as rock music, an emphasis on costuming, acting, dance and social networking. The short intro is that in New Burlesque they never fall out of their pasties and G-strings, although there have been legendary accidents. More on New Burlesque later. You’ll have to dig up the legendary accidents for yourself.
Looking around the 29th St. Ballroom I saw an alternative crowd of hipsters, street people, artists, retired go-go- girls, industrial workers, a few Goths (getting old and gray now), the leather crowd, in short, the demimonde. Jigglewatts aficionados all. The acreage of tattooed flesh was so great that it truly became urban camouflage. This is not mine, OK, I’ve heard it before, but it is certainly true. These are the people who have unfettered imaginations and are ruled by their dreams, not the boss’s punch-clock. They pay for having minds and talents by working behind retail counters and in repair shops their entire lives. Management does not like or promote them, and they scrape together a living in one postindustrial slough or another. Altogether they form a vast underground tribe.
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