Shake, shimmy, glitter

A giant, felt penis walks onstage. Two women join—they're sporting blue wigs and bouncing around on blue balls. Then they ejaculate glitter.

There’s a gorilla, too. The gorilla grabs a guy in the audience, who gets spanked by a woman onstage with a wooden paddle. Don’t feel too bad—the gorilla gives him a lap dance.

Panties are thrown onto the stage. A banana is sucked, whipped cream is added, and it’s sucked again. A woman strips and sprawls out on a couch, stuffing her face with chips and beer.

This is burlesque—and it’s very much alive in Sacramento.

The Sizzling Sirens Burlesque Experience troupe recently celebrated its six-year anniversary—with the giant penis, gorilla, banana and so forth—and its brand of outrageous, cheeky burlesque has been packing downtown’s Assembly Music Hall for the past year.

Until less than two years ago, the Sirens show was the only burlesque act in town. Then a new group surfaced: The Darling Clementines, which recently snagged a monthly slot at Marilyn’s on K. A few months later, the Bodacious Bombshells Burlesque Revue started up and has performed at the Starlite Lounge, The Colonial Theatre and Witch Room. .

And then last week, yet another debuted: Jezebelle’s Army, a troupe that merges burlesque and pole dancing. Meanwhile, a producer is filming a burlesque-themed reality television show right here in Sacramento.

Who are these performers? Schoolteachers, firefighters, tattoo artists and others—some trained in dance or theater, but many of them not—ages 18-43. They say they find burlesque empowering, and clearly there’s a local demand for it—hundreds pour into venues nearly every week to see women shimmy out of corsets. Oh, and most of the audiences are made up of women.

“The wonderful thing about burlesque is that it’s such a broad genre,” says Jay Siren, founder of The Sizzling Sirens. “Your creativity knows no bounds.”

Two years after forming her group, Siren quit her day job in order to fully immerse herself in the burlesque world. She got involved with the national Burlesque Hall of Fame. She built her own show into a large-scale, multimedia production. Now she’s expanding and putting on new events, including a branch of the wildly popular cabaret figure-drawing phenomenon Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.

More troupes are in town? Siren isn’t too worried, or all that surprised. She understands how easy it is to get hooked.

“I got the tiniest bit of exposure, and I was sick with it,” Siren says. “I’m sure that’s not an experience unique to me at all.”

ChaCha Burnadette formed one of the first burlesque troupes in New Mexico seven years ago. Surfing the Web, she discovered the burlesque revival, its many plus-sized performers, and immediately felt like she found a community.

“It had this new feminist push behind it,” she says. “It was edgy and cool, and it was girls like me.”

American burlesque arrived in the 1800s, and it brought together striptease, cabaret and comedy. It was arguably the start of crude, slapstick comedy, though that element faded in time in favor of glamorous women. Still, burlesque was more about the tease than the stripping—and it was always delivered with a sly, knowing wink.

Burlesque disappeared in the 1960s, when behavior that was once naughty became mainstream. But the 1990s brought a revival: neo-burlesque.

The Sirens embrace the neo-burlesque style—dancers usually wear modern costumes and strip to contemporary songs. Sometimes there’s no stripping at all. It’s theatrical. Body movements tell a story. Adult humor is peppered in, and sometimes SpongeBob SquarePants appears, and things get crazy-weird.

The Bodacious Bombshells generally stick to classic burlesque—long gloves, glitzy gowns, giant feather fans and an old-timey soundtrack. And while the other troupes in town average eight members, Bombshells founder Raven LaRoux leads 20 people. She says she wishes she could take more—women are constantly asking to join.

“A friend turns another friend on—pun intended—to burlesque, and it spreads like wildfire,” she says. “They see there’s nothing to be weirded out or creeped out about, or threatened about.”

Many go to their first show and are amazed by the variety—a Burnadette’s Darling Clementines show, for example, might include aerial dancers, fire dancers, belly dancers, poets, musicians and comedians.

But for Burnadette, burlesque is about reveling in being a modern American woman and convincing the world that no one should be judged by waist size.

“I go up there with this idea that half the audience has this preconceived notion about what it means to be a fat woman,” she says. “And me coming up onstage must be comical, extreme or anything but sexy, graceful or attractive. My job is to change their minds.”

It’s serious motivation—much more than just entertaining a crowd. And it stems from facing massive prejudice as a burlesque dancer in New Mexico. Burnadette says she’d receive hate mail frequently—death threats, even—and it wasn’t because of the striptease.

“You’d think people would call us sluts or hoochies, but no one could get past that we were fat girls taking our clothes off,” she says.

Lula Belle, founder of Jezebelle’s Army, is tired of listening to women say they’re not sexy, strong or thin enough to try pole dancing or burlesque.

“I’m not the youngest, I’m not the fittest, but burlesque is about how we feel about ourselves,” she says. “We women often put ourselves down before anyone else does.”

But what about the male gaze? What about objectification? Why are so many feminists—like Burnadette, who graduated from college with a women’s studies degree—on board with this form of striptease?

“There’s no way any of my acts will be interpreted as me being a bimbo with nothing to say, or me being a silent woman who is meant to only be looked at,” Burnadette says. “It’s about your approach. … I’m covering myself in blood, flipping off the audience and doing handstands. I don’t think at that point I am being that objectified—I’m being entertaining.”

Earlier this year, efforts began in Sacramento to film a reality show called Frack Girls. The show is still in production, but nearly every experienced burlesque dancer who was initially interested—including Burnadette—have abandoned it.

The premise: A burlesque troupe forms on-camera, the girls rehearse, there’s inevitable drama, and they all wind up in an oil-producing town in North Dakota for a big performance at the end of the season.

Dancers say the show is irresponsible and disrespectful to the art form, and by traveling to a city with a male-to-female ratio of 100-to-1, puts the women in a dangerous situation.

Will Wright is the local man producing Frack Girls, and he insists that his heart is in the right place. He cites his daughters and sisters—10 altogether—and says he wants a show with female role models for them.

“The media is a constant barrage of negative stereotypes of women,” he says. “My daughters would always say they’re too fat. … We thought this could be a positive body-image thing and celebrate women of all shapes and sizes.”

Wright hopes to complete filming by fall. Doug Stanley, locally based, Emmy-winning producer of Deadliest Catch, approves of the concept and says he’ll help Wright sell the show if it’s good enough.

But a late-June casting call yielded little talent. No one who auditioned had actually done burlesque before. The judges weren’t burlesque dancers, either. One judge—an actor Wright happened to find the night prior at a local bar—had never seen live burlesque in Sacramento. At the first casting call, an experienced burlesque dancer from the Bay Area was declined while a drunk first-timer was invited back, according to Burnadette and others who were on set.

“It was a trainwreck, but the camera loves her,” Wright admits.

Wright says the clash between his production and local burlesque dancers is akin to any business interest merging with an art form. But the television show is also a byproduct of burlesque entering the mainstream—of burlesque as something to be commodified. And that inevitably leads back to questions about the exploitation of women.

“You could call it exploitation, but the women will be well-compensated, and they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t love it,” Wright says.

That may be true, although most local burlesque performers don’t expect much money for their efforts—Siren is the only troupe-leader making a living in the burlesque and entertainment worlds. She’s extra hopeful that the Sacramento scene won’t become oversaturated, but at the same time, that enough women are passionate enough to ensure burlesque thrives.

“Burlesque has been part of our entertainment world forever—it keeps coming back for a reason. I like to think that it will be OK,” she says. “Either way, I’m going to ride it until the wheels fall off.”