Ah, Nerdlesque. An extension of cosplay, which is the act of dressing up as one’s favorite pop culture character, Nerdlesque has almost single-handedly kept burlesque shows afloat. Where most audiences may still be asking “what is burlesque? What will I see at a burlesque show?” a themed burlesque show that references familiar material is an easy sell as in “let’s see naked Princess Leia!” In the current restrictive economy, where so many just want to stay in and binge watch netflix, it has been a welcome form of income for shows and performers. And cosplay was the gateway drug for quite a few of us performers into performing burlesque. If I could walk around a Con in my Blade Runner costume, then why not turn that into a Rachel act? Except, cosplay and burlesque are anti-thesis of each other. Cosplay is the act of faithfully recreating that the way it looked in the movie/comic book/video game. Burlesque, on the other hand, is about creating a parody, employing traits like glamour, exaggeration and hyper-sexuality. Granted, much of that is changing, and I wholly credit burlesque with the introduction of many cosplayers who blend new elements into their recreations. How many steampunk Harley Quinns did I see at Comic-Con this year? Quite a few! Or the mash-up Playboy Bunny/Star Trek cosplay? This brings up a new and exciting dilemma to hit the sci-fi genre: we are women, hear us roar. When I started attending Comic-Con in the early 90s, females were as rare a commodity as female characters in genre media. For example, if you loved Star Wars, you could dress up as Princess Leia… or Princess Leia. And that left you mostly either Old-School Leia in white robe and oversized buns, or Slave Leia in modified belly dance costume, because it’s too damn hot to dress as Hoth Leia, and Christ almighty, that Bespin costume looks like a Golden Girls reject. But, what if you didn’t want to dress up as Leia? How many female characters did you have to choose from? Nurse Chapel or Uhura, Catwoman, Wonder Woman. The pickings were slim. Or you could go in drag as a male character*. So here we are on a new threshold of taking someone’s existing character and being able to give it a new spin by adding a steampunk flavor, or glamorizing it, or re-gender-ing it. And it’s this growth that makes for both great cosplay and great nerdlesque, because what we are seeing is how said character matters to the person wearing them. It’s this personalization that makes the character, well, personal. And I think this elevates a nerdlesque act from just a broad in a mask and corset**. It allows the audience an insight as to why you, as the performer, wants to inhabit that person, even if it’s just subtext. I have an affection for Rachel from Blade Runner because I was brainwashed as a child—both she, and I, have memory implants. Although I do not reference this point in my act, I believe that it provides me a place explore what that means to have faulty memories, and hopefully comes through to the audience. It’s a visual shorthand for you to say to the audience “here is Character X—you already know if they are a good guy or bad guy, their motivations, their character arcs—now let’s take that one step further!” It’s also similar when you are dancing to pop music. While we on the subject of nerds, let’s look at the trailer for the film Guardians of the Galaxy. In the trailer, they use Blue Suede’s “Hooked on a Feeling”. It’s incredibly dopey song, and it tells you that StarLord, our hero, might be equally as dopey. Your music is one of the first two things your audience will see/hear for your act (the other being your costume) Again, we can talk about an audio shorthand—if you’re playing “Fight For Right To Party” by the Beastie Boys, that brings up certain connotations for the audience: the 80s, early hip-hop, frat boy culture. It is impossible to use Bonnie Tyler's “Totally Eclipse of the Heart” with a straight face—in fact you could argue this song in and of itself is a burlesque as it automatically invokes parody. However, when you are using someone else’s character from a billion dollar blockbuster, or a pop song that sat on the Billboard 100s chart for weeks at a time, you can’t ever fully expect to own them. That’s the tricky part to being a nerdlesque performer: find that obscure character, or song, and you risk the audience not immediately getting your frame of reference. You will have to work a little harder to get the audience on your side and make them love your chosen character and song as much as you do. But for those three people in the audience who “get you”, they will pee their pants that you, dressed as Nurse Chapel, fan danced to “Beyond Antares” go-go stripped to “Surf Trek” and then spiked your wig into the audience to reveal Klingon pasties and a cranial ridge.*** Until next month, LLAP! * This is why we see so many burlesque acts set to Firefly—it was a sci-fi that actually had more than one female character. And I was overwhelmed with joy to see so many Tina and Louise Belchers from Bob’s Burgers at Con this year, because not only are they women characters, but they are women characters little girls can dress up as that is age appropriate. I should also not that the Bob/Louise combination was the preferred costume of Father/Daughter sets. **Nerds—and by nerds I mean the booky, the ostracized and sometimes bullied--get upset at the broad in a mask and a corset. See, for many of us, nerdom was an escape from a world where we didn’t fit in (junior high and high school, potentially an unhappy home) to a world that accepted us (other nerds). Nerdom is our secret culture; so when it’s co-opted by those who know nothing of it, make no effort to research it, and are only using as a theme to make a buck, we get understandably upset. *** Yes, that’s my act!
