Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

SEX

Burlesque booms in radical, naughty Berlin

Burlesque is not just a naked lady in a cocktail glass - that is just one style of a complex movement in which Berlin has reclaimed its pre-war global top spot for radical naughtiness. Jessica Ware spoke with one of the capital’s performers.

Published: 1 May 2012 16:45 CEST
Burlesque booms in radical, naughty Berlin
Photo: Elsa Quarsell "The Domestic Burlesque"

When US-born neo-burlesque performer Clea Cutthroat takes to the stage in Berlin her strip-tease is anything but coquettish.

Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding’ kicks off her cross-dressing priest act which ends in spatters of fake blood and milk.

Click here for a selection of photos from “The Domestic Burlesque”

First to go is the priest’s robe, which reveals a wedding dress underneath. Cutthroat drinks from a bottle labelled “female hormones” before removing her draggy wedding dress and make-up.

Shoes and wig also end up on the floor as the transformation is complete and the full woman underneath is revealed.

Cutthroat then drinks “holy water” – actually milk – pours it over herself, and then takes a mouthful of “communion wine” to bring the scene to climax as she spits fake blood everywhere before strapping her entire body up in heavy-duty tape.

A “middle finger to gender roles.”

For her, burlesque is a lot more than stripping down to fancy underwear. “A lot of it for me is playing with people’s responses and pushing people’s predefined ideas and stereotypes,” Cutthroat told The Local.

She said her performance plays with the ideas of inner and outer beauty. As for spitting blood that’s either a “middle finger to gender roles or even to burlesque itself,” depending on her mood.

Cutthroat is a proponent of neo-burlesque, which rejects the pure glamour of traditional performances for an edgier mix.

Original burlesque performance was initially developed in the 1800s, and often used by the lower classes to subvert societal conventions and to retell popular stories in a more bawdy way. It developed into a sexy strip tease in the early 1900s but faded into obscurity later in the century.

Now the tradition has been revived, and many strands are just as radical as their predecessors – in today’s society embracing physical imperfection while emanating strength can be surprisingly subversive.

“When a performer is on stage, they are in control. There are no rules that say they have to get naked,” Cutthroat told The Local. “I personally only take off clothes if it makes sense in the story.”

International burlesque performers moving to Berlin

On stage, a performer is empowered by the freedom of being who they want to be. Neo-burlesque gives performers like Cutthroat the space to make all their own decisions without the pressure of conforming to expectations – because there are none.

Cutthroat is just one of the many international performers who have settled in the German capital.

Names like Lady Lou, Julietta la Doll, Marlene von Steenvag are all regulars on the scene. They let Swedish photographer Elsa Quarsell into their homes to be photographed for her book “The Domestic Burlesque” project.

This shows the performers in their stage get-up at home in domestic settings – a way of showing the different identities of the women concerned.

Quarsell told The Local she was watching a burlesque show in a working-men’s club in East London when she found herself thinking about the different identities of the women on stage. She soon found herself in cities across the world shooting performers, in full stage get-up, in their own homes.

Her book features many women working in Berlin – the German capital famed for Cabaret has blossomed on the map of burlesque performance over the last few years.

The combination of cheap rent, liberal attitude and good pay has made Berlin a prime place to be for performers, said Cutthroat.

The contrast between stage and home

She came to Berlin five years ago, after realising that “artistically I felt I could go no further in New York,” said Cutthroat. “Berlin allowed me to move into artistic adulthood.”

While Cutthroat’s routine might be testing the ideas of inner beauty, Quarsell’s new book takes this a step further, offering a glimpse into the performer’s homes – a world arguably more private than the flesh they bare on stage.

“I wanted to see if they were like that at home,” Quarsell told The Local. Her search for the contrast between art and real life took her as far at the US and Japan and took two years.

“I found that either you would have no idea what kind of nocturnal lives these people were living, and their houses were pretty plain, or they were totally vintage and burlesque-esque.”

For Cutthroat though, who trained as a professional dancer, her burlesque life and her home life are “like church and state, and never the two should meet.”

“Normally I don’t ever dress as Clea at home, my friends wouldn’t be able to cope if I was like that in real life,” she laughed.

“The Domestic Burlesque” is in English and brimming with beautiful pictures. It is set for German release April 25, and will be available at selected retailers across the country and online.

There will be a release party in Pinky’s Peepshow in Berlin on the same day, where some of the women from the book will be performing.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

SHOW COMMENTS