Pasties and positivity

A Wink and a Smile takes an empowered feminist
look at a Seattle-based burlesque academy

by CHRISTOPHER SYKES

Chances are you’ve noticed a rise in the number of burlesque troops popping up around town in the last couple of years. Blue Light Burlesque, for one, has made quite a name for itself titillating Montreal audiences with their lavish and audacious routines, and news about good quasi-nude performance art travels fast. Simply put, there’s a lot of cachet in burlesque these days.

Enter director Deirdre Timmons, a Seattle-based journalist, who, with her first feature-length film, A Wink and a Smile, captures the six-week adventure of 10 very different women as they “graduate” from Seattle’s Academy of Burlesque.

Headmistress and pedagogue Miss Indigo Blue, an ex-stripper who founded the neo-burlesque academy in 2003, wholeheartedly takes on the mother hen role, coaxing her students to embrace their inner Bettie Page. A series of remarkably candid talking-head interviews accompany the women as they learn the ropes from Miss Blue. Tears are shed as one young student discusses her battles with bulimia and poor body image.

A sprightly 51-year-old mother of two talks of feeling more desirable at 50 than ever and her desire to “bring back the beauty of the sagging breast.” Trouble words like “appalled” and “saddened” are mentioned numerous times regarding how the women would perceive their own mothers’ reactions to the course.

Timmons has cleverly crafted A Wink and a Smile so as to cover not only each student’s personal transition at the academy, but also the history of burlesque as an entertainment form used to critique conventional institutions and hierarchies guilty of misusing their power.

There’s an inescapable thesis in the film that may well explain the current renaissance of the art: burlesque’s anti-establishment, anti-fundamentalist acceptance of camp and over-the-top flamboyance in a public arena as way to stick it to the man and celebrate both performance and sexuality. The breathtakingly intricate costumes and tongue-in-cheek humour that accompany the performances certainly don’t hurt, either.

A WINK AND A SMILE OPENS AT THE
CINÉMA DU PARC THIS FRIDAY, MAY 15.
PERFORMERS FROM THE BLUE LIGHT
BURLESQUE WILL BE ON HAND TO
DISCUSS THEIR ART AFTER
THE NIGHTLY SCREENINGS.