ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE

One of the things I have been working on lately - we made something of a "burlesque play" for the Helsinki Burlesque Festival (which was last weekend). I had this idea of something of an eerie but also totally crazy funny short story about a laboratory and a burlesque robot that I put into a script and that we -the Itty-Bitty Tease Cabaret, five women strong again for this one- worked on together.

And the result turned into exactly what it was supposed to! We performed our little play together with the festival's jazz trio improvising in the background (and that band is so good! They made it perfect). It was the most fun I've had on stage in a long time; to make something totally new and rather unseen before. Burlesque, in short, is entertainment, and you aim to please the audience, but at certain events -like a festival - you can go for different numbers, stretch the limits of what belongs to which genre and please the audience by giving them something else than the expected. (This number is not for the dinner parties no). And most spectators loved this  -but not all liked it (because we were not being "just" pretty and dancing in beautiful costumes which some want to limit down to because they don't think about the whole spectrum of what a performance can be; this also in short). In this case I am happy about that; doing something that was not meant to make everyone love it straight away but to rather to make people go 'Oh, you can do it like this too?'

And I have to add that that robotic metallic hair I was working on at 3am last week turned out pretty good.

Because this after all is burlesque I am not going to show you the pictures from the end of the play but yes; the robot takes over the world.

For those of you suffering from burlesque abstinence from the festival week Tinker and me are throwing a small relaxed burlesque club at Mascot this Friday. (And then I am off performing for a Women's Day part-charity-show spectacle in Turku on Saturday in case you still want some more.)

Photos 1, 3&4by Tuomas Lairila and 2&5 JBM.