www.exoticworldthemovie.com
EXOTIC WORLD AND THE BURLESQUE REVIVAL
A DOCUMENTARY BY RED TREMMEL
The Past
During the late 1950s, burlesque dancer Jennie Lee, "The Bazoom Girl," founded the first labor union for burlesque dancers. As burlesque faded in the following decades, Jennie Lee gathered dancers together for reunions, collecting photos, stories, costumes, props, and other significant artifacts from her fellow dancers, hoping to one day build a museum and retirement home for retired strippers.
During the 1980s, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Jennie's dream started to materialize on a small goat ranch off Route 66. There, she and her husband Charlie Arroyo intended to build the world's first museum dedicated to the art of the striptease and its performers. Over many months dancers gathered at the remote ranch and fantasized about a future museum, retirement community, waterfalls, and an American tourist public seeking to learn about their past.
"Us girls knew who we were, and we knew we were
part of an industry that wasn't recognized, so we just decided to recognize it ourselves."
--Dixie Evans, The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque
Diagnosed with breast cancer, Jennie Lee enlisted Dixie Evans, the postwar era "Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," to move to the goat ranch, take over renovations, and keep their dreams alive. The women nailed costumes, photos, and other artifacts to the walls, dubbed the museum "Exotic World," and waited for the tourists to come.
In 1990, Jennie passed away, leaving Dixie and Jennie's widower Charlie to keep the dream of Exotic World alive.
As tourists slowly began making their way to Wild Road, past the lion statues and through the iron gates of Exotic World, legendary stars of the postwar burlesque era also began making annual visits with their scrapbooks for a reunion and pageant. In the meantime, dancers seeking nursing care and a home began making their way to the ranch.
The Present
Then, in the early 2000s, everything changes. After several clever national press campaigns, Dixie begins drawing crowds more exuberant than she could have imagined. Young women, from across the country, some accompanied by their mothers, arrive to meet Dixie and listen to her first hand accounts of striptease history.
Word spreads among young performers across the world about the annual reunion pageant, an event that draws legends, and dozens begin making annual pilgrimages to meet their predecessors and compete at the reunion for the title of Miss Exotic World. These young women grow dedicated to the museum, seeing in burlesque a shared sexual sensibility, and in Dixie a fairy godmother.
In the blazing desert, each dancer, whether an elderly legend or young revivalist, in spectacular hand-made costumes, bursts out on the sun-drenched wooden stage to perform short, sexy and often comedic dances about desire and femininities.
Collectively, performers across generations spectacularize their varied responses to being sexual subjects/objects of attention. Performing a wide variety of roles—dominatrix, goddess, waitress, daddy's little girl, vixen, diva, housewife, glamour girl, racialized exotic, seductress, virgin, soldier, starlet, cross-dresser—performers use tricks of their trade, such as comedy, magic, gymnastics, stunts, and choreography, to create compelling ideas about gender, desire, power, pleasure, beauty, and aging in American culture.
A national burlesque community starts to take shape. Performers connect with one another at Exotic World, share ideas, and create a performance network through New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, Tokyo, and London. Together they launch an international revival among thousands of women, men who perform boylesque, and performers who identify as transgender.
In the meantime, however, the years are taking a toll on both Dixie and her beloved museum. County regulators threaten to shut down the operation. As a new generation of dancers fall in love with the elderly museum curator and her history project, they begin to realize that they may have arrived just in time to experience Exotic World's last days.
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Ann Corio's This Was Burlesqueby burlesquefest45,541 views
to The Matrix ....check out eroticworldthemovie website and you will find ways to donate. What a fabulous project. Lets all honour these wonderful women who dared to be different!
ladycherie 10 months ago
Can you post any clips of any of the girls performing magic as part of their burlesque act? I love, support, and respect ALL female magicians. Is there any way I can make a monetary donation in the form of a Money Order, maybe $40 or $50, so I can do my part in helping to keep your museum going?
TheMatrix72370 10 months ago