Cabaret Burlesque in Toronto: A Troupe Profile

Toronto's burlesque community includes many troupes, each with its own taste in costume, music and staging. One company describes its work as closer to theatre than to a run of striptease numbers, and uses the label cabaret burlesque for the result.

The founding artistic director explained the thinking in an interview published by the site. The ideas below summarize that account.

A party rather than a performance

The troupe was founded by friends in the mid-2000s. Its stated aim is live theatre that lets audience members leave everyday worries at the door. Shows pull the crowd into the action and use each venue as fully as possible, so that people feel like guests at a party hosted by the cast.

Roots in cabaret and vaudeville

The company draws on early cabaret and vaudeville, two entertainment forms that preceded modern burlesque. Its routines present a kind of retrospective of the dancing girl image from the late nineteenth century to the present. Music ranges from classic jazz to pop, and costumes mix vintage and contemporary looks.

Open to many kinds of audience

Accessibility is a stated mandate. The director described audiences in which seniors sit beside people in their twenties, all enjoying the same material. The troupe also says its work is made mostly by women for women and the people who love them, and counts audience enthusiasm among women as a mark of success.

Sexuality as playful art

The company aims to celebrate sexuality as art without taking itself too seriously. Its stated goals at the time included building a community of artists and widening its audience beyond the city, partly through social media.

In this way the group positions itself within a crowded scene while respecting the other troupes around it. The director spoke warmly of the variety among local performers and presented the theatre label as one more niche in a city with room for many styles.

The wider point concerns how burlesque keeps changing. Once associated with raucous variety houses, the form now spans comic revue, art performance and theatre-influenced shows, and troupes often define themselves by the tradition they borrow from rather than by a single formula.