Burlesquing the Burlesque through Practice as Research HEA Embodied Cognition Seminar University of Winchester Tuesday 30th April 2013 Charlie Broom.

Burlesquing the Burlesque

through Practice as Research

HEA Embodied Cognition Seminar

University of Winchester

Tuesday 30th April 2013

Charlie Broom

My research uses a practice-as-research methodology in order to challenge notions of ‘burlesque’ as a type of popular striptease and re-conceptualise the term as a verb ‘to burlesque’. Therefore, rather then burlesque being a genre it becomes a method of working.

In the chapter ‘The Beauties of Burlesque’ in Parody, (2000) Simon Denith argues that,

‘Burlesque, […] is a seventeenth-century coinage, first used in Italian then French, but passing rapidly into English’. (123)

Like most critics Denith proposes that ‘burlesque’, ‘designated writing both in the theatre and poetry […]’ (ibid)

•V.C. Clinton-Baddeley in The Burlesque Tradition In The English Theatre After 1660 (1952:5)

•Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1985)

•Margaret Rose in Parody: Ancient, Modern and Postmodern (1993:54)

All suggest that burlesque was a form of parodic theatre or writing that sent up other revered, canonical texts or plays.

The route meaning of the word burlesque is derived from the ‘Italian ‘Burlesco from Burla, a joke, or a trick.

In English Burlesque Poetry 1700-1750 (1932) Richard P Bond suggests that, ‘burlesque’, ‘[…] consists of the use or imitation of serious matter or manner, made amusing by the creation of an incongruity between style and subject.’ (3)

‘Burlesquing’ A comedic perceptional framework?

In The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World (2007), Conrad Hyers suggests that,

‘To understand comedy is to understand humanity. Among the defining characteristics of the human spirit is the capacity for laughter, humor, revelry, and setting things in comic perspective. Informally this spirit is expressed in joking, banter, punning, horseplay, and the general refusal to take matters with absolute seriousness - or to absolutize them. More formally this spirit is expressed by comic figures such as the jester, clown, fool, humorist, comic hero, rogue, and trickster. These figures both symbolize and incarnate the comic spirit. And they officiate in comic rituals as mock priests whose public role is to encourage the comic spirit and its vision of life’. (1)

MY TACIT & EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE

•How does one ‘burlesque’ something?

•How does one know when they are involved in this philosophic shift of burlesquing?

•What techniques are involved in burlesquing?

•How can this ‘spirit’ and the subtle changes in perception inherent in burlesquing be evidenced?

‘In fact, comedy employs a great variety of techniques and a vast repertoire of signals and cues - some blatant, some quite subtle - which indicate that even the same circumstances are being understood in a different spirit and seen through a different lens’. (Hyers, 2007:3)

SERIOUS MATTER OR

MANNER

Where is Spring?

S.A.D.

Climate Change?

Psychologist Michael J Apter defines the ability of humans to shift from the mode of seriousness to playfulness as a switching between telic and paratelic consciousness and behaviour. (The Experience of Motivation: The Theory of Psychological Reversals (New York: Academic Press, 1982).

The Red Nose

‘The smallest mask in the world’. (Jacques Lecoq).

Hyers ‘signals and cues’ of the comedic ‘spirit’

• Observation of the ‘serious’ in the High Street

• Comedy canvassing, interaction and invitation to play/to burlesque the serious - “Where do you think spring is?”

• Recording the burlesquing of the ‘audience’

•“It boiinged that way!” (points to sky)

•“It’s out of stock”

•“All due to the Meerkats, Simples!”

• “It’s in my left sock”

•The cat’s got it in the bag”

•It’s having a lie in”

•The Monkjack deer at the bottom of my garden has it”

Due to movements of air in the upper atmosphere???

Work Cited

Bond, Richmond P., 1932. English Burlesque Poetry 1700-1750. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Clinton-Baddley, V.C., 1952. The Burlesque Tradition In The English Theatre After 1660. London and New York: Methuen.

Denith, Simon., 2000. Parody. London and New York: Routledge.

Hutcheon, Linda., 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen.

Hyers, Conrad., 2007. The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World. New Brunswick and London:Transaction Publishers.

Rose, Margaret., 1993. Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.