Cirrus@Austlit

'The Burlesque Hour, created by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, brings together a diverse range of Australian and international performers, who employ a variety of di!erent performance styles yet share an interest in exploring issues of sexuality and gender and in utilising what Finucane describes as a 'burlesque sensibility'. The Burlesque Hour is one of Australia's most popular, successful and critically acclaimed burlesque shows. It has performed nationally and internationally since 2004 and at the time of writing is touring Australia under the title 'Caravan Burlesque'. While the majority of vignettes that make up the show originated in small clubs and avant-garde theatre venues, The Burlesque Hour has propelled them into visibility, leading small-scale, experimental works to be seen by over 90,000 spectators worldwide.3 The performance is immensely entertaining and pleasurable and also frequently provocative, confronting and challenging. It occupies an interesting position within contemporary burlesque in that it departs from the 'tassels and tease' style of much new burlesque and maintains a decidedly subversive agenda.' (Publication abstract)

'Press accounts of public appearances by the Fijian Cricket Team that toured Australia in 1907-08 expose broader social trends in contemporary understandings of commercialised sport, popular entertainment and male sexuality. The centrality of the Fijians' apparel to the sexual display within their performances suggests that the team fused humour with a desire to appeal to the massive crowds that patronised their matches - upward of 9,000 spectators at some games. By simultaneously appropriating a national game - cricket - the team engineered a forum for entertainment that confronted Edwardians with illustrations of raw power, physical prowess and near-naked Fijian masculinity. To this day, these reports offer vivid examples of how the team enticed Edwardians with performances combining sport, ethnographic display, and titillation.' (Publication abstract)

'In a flaunting of bodily 'dis'-play, female burlesque performers of the mid-nineteenth century elevated themselves to celebrity status. By upholding an ethos of irreverence that twisted and unsettled the more problematic ideals of 'womanliness', they provided strategies for their contemporary successors. Such presences continue to flourish in the dream-like shadows or liminal spaces of desire and trickster-infused play to prod audiences (consciously or unconsciously) into new ways of imagining - particularly in relation to the elusive and multidimensional concept of the feminine. The shape-shifting trickster figure is a ubiquitous presence in myth, literature, theatre and screen storytelling (as reworked myth). While it evades any conclusive definition, it's not difficult to recognise core features. The same applies to burlesque and its many manifestations. Like trickster, the form and content of the genre can be elusive, marginal, resilient and absurd - a web of play that in itself defies reason, but inspires much theorising and cultural reflection. It is in the spirit of this focus issue that the following interdisciplinary analysis will look both to and beyond traditional understandings of female-centred burlesque and its manipulation of the feminine. After a brief contextualising history, the emphasis will shift to consider of how this kind of entertainment can be thought of as a liminal experience steeped in trickster energy.' (Publication abstract)