The art of burlesque

Date Published: 22-Aug-2007

When bellydance teacher Lisa Collins called a few venues in the city for a burlesque dance workshop for her students and the general public, given by a guest teacher, one establishment told her straight out on the telephone that they “didn’t facilitate stripping”.
Mention the word burlesque to a hundred people and you can be guaranteed that the vast majority of them will conjure up images of raunchy women stripping down to, well, nothing, and lap dancing.
However,Monique Vanderpol, who hosted the workshop recently and who has been teaching burlesque dancing for the past eight or nine years, is quick to defend the dance movement and dismiss stereotypes of it as raunchy and seedy; “It is definitely not about pole dancing,” says the Amsterdam native.