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 Burlesque Queen America's not quite ready for Michelle L'amour
Brandy didn't get it.
On NBC's hit reality-competition show "America's Got Talent,"
Chicago burlesque dancer Michelle L'amour's talent didn't go over so
well. Judge David Hasselhoff liked it fine--the performance was an ode
to his knight-ridin' younger days, complete with a replica of KITT and
the car's robotic voice rambling "This is a family show!" and "I have
to stop her!" as L'amour did her bump and grind on stage. The Simon
Cowell wannabe Piers Morgan giggled his way through the act too, but
ultimately dismissed it. Brandy's frown engulfed her face from the
start--and she then went on a self-righteous rampage about how burlesque
dancing isn't a talent. L'amour had been on the show once before and did
her now-famous Snow White tease, but that only led to NBC message boards
spewing labels like "whore" and "slut." Apparently they didn't
appreciate "The Ass That Goes Pow!" as L'amour dubs herself.
"But it is a talent," L'amour pleaded to the judges to no
avail. She was out of the competition.
"It looks easy if you do it well, like anybody can do it," L'amour
says now, weeks after the show, on why some don't understand the talent
the act involves. "But I'm here to say not everyone can do it. You
can't just pick it up. There's so much that goes into it--the script,
the costume, choreography--it's not just a girl taking off her clothes.
It's about how and when and why you do it. And it really pissed me off
that she [Brandy] didn't see that! I kind of thought her behavior was an
act, like, `Well, maybe she isn't this horrible and stupid.' But... she
is. On and off camera, she was the same to me either way." L'amour faces the stripper stigma every day. "Technically I am a
stripper," she says, "but not in the modern sense. Burlesque is where
stripping came from. Back in the day they were called `exotics.' It was
all about the tease. Once TV came into the world, the girls became more
lewd, and then it became what it is today. I don't know if I ever could
do that--I have never performed in a club. I'm not saying it's bad or
wrong or whatever, I just prefer the theater setting."
L'amour, on her Web site, even goes so far as to list bullet points
on the differences between burlesque and stripping, including
burlesque's lack of pole and lap dances, and its inclusion of character
and story lines. "In the theater setting, the audience is the
audience, but in the club, the audience is the customer.
It's a whole different sale thing going on. I don't take tips. I just
dance. I don't make as much money as they do, but whatever. Hopefully I
will someday." And in her best Regis Philbin impression, lamenting on
her "America's Got Talent" loss: "I could've won a million dollars!"
L'amour also shrugs at the contemporary notion of burlesque as a
vessel for empowerment, a term she enthusiastically labels "lame!"
"That's great that you feel empowered and all, but you're [supposed to
be] turning on the audience. That's my purpose in performing. I come
from a dance background, so I teach my students from that perspective,
because when you're removing clothes, you need to know how to move your
body. You kind of have to move it differently when you're naked because,
you know, there's good naked and bad naked. But performing, when I get
to do my thing, I get to let loose and turn people on." It's
definitely turning someone on, as L'amour has emerged as one of
America's leading characters behind the revival of burlesque culture, a
revival fueled by a mix of underground theater, camp and post-feminist
critique. In other words, a long way from the strip club. Bored one night at school, she decided to head down to a local talent
show and dance. That's where she met her now-fiancé Franky Vivid, who
saw her act and asked her to choreograph a dance for his rock band's
live show. "He said the word dance so he had me immediately."
After working with Vivid's band, the two decided to do a full-on
burlesque show. L'amour's first performance, a striptease at Champaign's
famous small rock club the High Dive, came as a result of a dancer not
showing up to the gig. L'amour was just choreographing at the time, as
well as teaching hip-hop dance classes to younger kids. She was 22 and
hadn't performed a striptease before. "I showed up, threw on my costume
and just did it," she says. "I was rushing around too much to really
even think about being nervous. It was just like, `Whoa. I need to do
that again.' I had created a monster."
This ultimately led to the creation of L'amour and Vivid's company,
Lavender Cabaret, in the summer of 2002, a modernized burlesque variety
show that included dance, striptease and comedy. As word-of-mouth spread
L'amour's act throughout the city, she began touring, and had a major
success at Los Angeles' "Tease-O-Rama." Since then L'amour has
performed in more than seventy-five different venues in
Chicago--including Funky Buddha, the Congress Theater and
Subterranean--and multiple cities in North America, from New York to
Vegas to Austin. Lavender Cabaret has been responsible for a variety of
productions in the city, including work at The Second City and the
popular late-night show "Femme TV." In 2005, L'amour won the nation's
leading burlesque competition, "Miss Exotic World," with her Snow
White act and now, along with performing, teaches dance classes in
multiple cities--here in Chicago at Arabesque Dance Studio, where she
does weekly lessons in burlesque and the "Art of the Tease"--and often
highlights bachelorette parties, teaching brides-to-be new ways to
excite their soon-to-be-husbands.
L'amour and Vivid have recently launched Star & Garter Burlesque, a
new company comprised of L'amour's class graduates. They rehearse at the
Arabesque studio, and it's not unlike any other dance rehearsal--wooden
floors and a giant, wall-sized mirror so the troupe can view itself
while practicing its routine. L'amour watches her students from a
distance as they do run-throughs of a variety of moves--set to a mix of
an old-school burlesque musical thump, now re-energized with modern
beats and even a Madonna "Material Girl" interlude. She's relaxed with
her company, but always professional--she assists dancers when she knows
they can do better, perform their moves with more precision. She doesn't
yell.
"I think I'm definitely a performer first," she says. "Performing
and teaching are rewarding in different ways. Teaching's great because I
can see how this affects people and how much these women really open up
from the first time they walk in the door. I'm happy to be a part of
that, kind of the cause of their stirring. Plus, I learn a lot more when
I'm teaching. I get to figure out how a certain move is done. It helps
me with my technique, keeps me active."
But the teaching doesn't stop in the classroom. "Every time I
perform it's educational," she says. "There are so many people who
still haven't seen burlesque, and after being on `America's Got Talent,'
I got so many emails where people were thrilled that something like this
is going on, they thought burlesque died. I'm just spreading the word.
I'm an evangelist in a totally different way!"
L'amour says that the women who sign up for her classes all have
separate reasons for doing so. "People come for different reasons,"
she says. "People come in if they want a workout, they come in if they
want to do something sexy for their partner. But then in the process
they find that they really feel good about themselves, and I'll get
emails from them a week later that say `I'm walking down the hallways at
work and I keep my head up and I'm confident!' It's exciting. I love
that."
On August 31, Star & Garter launches a weekly showcase at Lincoln
Avenue's Fizz Bar and Grill. "These students in Star & Garter have been
with me for like two years," she says. "I really wanted to create a
venue for them where they can do their thing. There's not a lot of
venues here in Chicago for that, so I wanted to give them an outlet."
L'amour choreographed the show, but doesn't dance with her students
on stage--she says she's wary of when teachers perform with their
students. Instead, she'll perform a solo act as part of the evening's
entertainment. "The difference between this show and the other ones is
that it's less of a production, there's more striptease involved. Also,
in this show, for the comedy, we use stand-up comedians."
One of those comedians, Chicagoan T.J. Miller, serves as the show's
host. "I'm a really big comedy scholar, I'm big into the history of
comedy," Miller says, "and I like the fact that stand-up has its roots
in vaudeville, and so does burlesque. So it was really cool to be a part
of the throwback."
Miller, who performs with The Second City, says that the
similarities between stand-up and burlesque are bigger than you'd think.
"They're both very vulnerable and powerful art forms that expose a
person in what can be a very embarrassing way, but they also play on
true emotions that people don't have much control over."
Will Miller cross over from stand-up into burlesque during the
production? "I'm just hosting, man," he says. "I'm not doing anything
with the girls. Which is a good thing, trust me." Having born-again Christian parents, as you can imagine, would lead
to much disagreement when she finally chose her career path (L'amour is
a stage name). In fact, the dancer chose finance as a major for college
as a sort of appeasement for her mother and father. After graduation,
she turned down multiple job offers in the finance world. "I wanted to
major in dance," she says. "I wanted to move to L.A. and be a dancer.
I was like, `Okay, I'll pick this because I'm good at math.' But in
class, I would just be thinking about dancing."
Her family didn't take her decision very well. "My family is not
happy about it," she says. "It's hard. It stinks, but I'm not gonna
stop doing what I do. I really wanted to dance and they didn't really
support that." They still haven't come to terms with her career path.
L'amour isn't even sure if they've seen her "America's Got Talent"
stint.
She's even tried to educate them. "I brought a documentary on
burlesque over to their house, but they wouldn't even watch it," she
says. "They took out their bibles and started reading me scripture. So
it didn't go very well. I went with the full intention of educating
them, but it didn't work out. That's where that stands."
L'amour estimates she performs once or twice a week, but if she were
on the East Coast that number would double. "The scene is really big
there, but no so much here," she says. "I'm concerned a little bit
about the conservative people here...I think that just being in the
Midwest you'll have that conservative slant to things. Here in the
actual city they've really opened up to it, though--I know there's a lot
of other troupes that have popped up in the past couple years. I know
that in order for me to have an audience I have to educate people first,
so that's where the teaching thing comes in, because then these women
realize, `oh, hey, she isn't a dirty whore. This is really good. I'm
having fun!' And then it becomes a great experience for everybody and
people can enjoy the innocence and the charm but also the dirtiness and
the intelligence that comes with it."
After performing burlesque for four years, does she still feel
shyness? "I'm kind of shy offstage," she says. "There are things I'm
really self-conscious about, like wearing white pants. Like, I
won't wear white pants. I won't wear shorts either. It's weird. I
can totally strip down to a g-string but wearing a pair of shorts makes
me crazy. I feel like everyone's looking at me. I guess I would just
rather be naked all the time."
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