You’re listening to the Author Diary Entries podcast. I’m your host, Sagan Morrow, and this is episode #202. Access the show notes and transcript of this episode at SaganMorrow.com/podcast.
Today, I want to talk about something that is “author life adjacent” — and share another facet of my creativity, which is my work as a burlesque performer. Specifically, I want to get into the “meaning-making” of burlesque, and do an analysis of a new burlesque solo act that I created, in terms of the interpretation of that act, and the meaning that we can extract from it.
(We did something similar as part of a previous episode on the Author Diary Entries about subversion and politics of creativity — tune in to Episode 188 if you’d like to check it out!)
I’ve been performing burlesque since 2017, and I began performing solos in 2023 under the stage name Babe Maverick. It is a big part of my life and a fantastic opportunity for creative expression.
In April of this year, I performed a new burlesque act that I called The Personification of Anxiety. The idea of this act is to illustrate the duality between *having anxiety* and *being anxious*. I have chronic anxiety, and one of the things that I found really helpful in managing my own anxiety is to view it as a misguided entity who’s trying to help, but keeps going about it all wrong: Maybe anxiety isn’t TRYING to be so overwhelming, scary, and overbearing! Maybe it wants to be friends with us. Maybe it’s well-meaning.
When I shifted my approach to anxiety and started thinking about it that way, it really improved my relationship to that anxiety, and my relationship with myself as a whole. Even though I still experience anxiety, I can manage it; I’ve come to terms with it and accept it, without letting it control me or take the wheel.
And THAT is what I sought to illustrate in this particular burlesque solo act.
With that in mind, I thought it would be fun today to do a breakdown of some of the symbolism in that act, and how I articulated these concepts through the medium of performance art. This is going to give you an idea of what goes on behind the scenes of the choices made in this kind of artform, but also what goes into the symbolism and theme choices in any kind of creative work — because these are also the types of things I like to think about when I’m writing novels: How to best convey themes, effectively integrate symbolism and weave that into the story, and so on.
Let’s dive in! You can watch a few clips from the video recording of my stage performance for The Personification of Anxiety on my burlesque instagram account — the handle is @BabeMaverick.
The concept of this Personification of Anxiety burlesque solo was, again, about that sort of duality between *having anxiety* and *being anxious*, and I was kind of acting out the characters — the character of anxiety itself, as well as what it is like being a person who has anxiety — so I was doing both of those parts throughout the entire act. As a result of that, my expressions did change from one movement to the next (and I'll talk more about that in a moment), but I wanted to specify this now that I was acting as two characters in this act.
I want to play around with that a lot more when I perform this particular act again in the future, really ensuring that there's a strong differentiation so that it's very clear to the audience when I am the anxiety itself (the personification of that anxiety) versus when I am the human being experiencing the anxiety. This is a chair dance, and I was using those moments when I was *actively on the chair* as being the human experiencing anxiety, and when I was NOT in the chair — when I was outside of the chair — that's when I was the personification of anxiety. So I definitely want to play around with that a lot more, because I don't think that entirely came across… I could be wrong! But I think that from an audience perspective, I could have done a bit of a better job of making that more obvious.
Let’s go over the symbolism of this act:
- First: It’s a chair dance.
- The chair acts almost like a tether — everything in the act circulates around the chair, which highlights how anxiety is always circling, AND the way in which we can feel as though we’re continually drawn back to it; we never quite escape its orbit.
- Second: The dress I wore is entirely beaded, with little holes in between each link.
- …It is essentially transparent, and because I only wore pasties and a thong underneath it, it wasn’t exactly subtle! That was a deliberate choice, because anxiety itself is not subtle. Anxiety itself IS often transparent! It can also make you feel very exposed — and I was “exposed” for the entirety of this act.
- The links of the dress also bring to mind the idea of a cage, and the way we can feel trapped or caged-in by our anxiety… and the removal of that dress at the end of the act is a symbolic escape from that cage.
- Third: There’s an elbow-length glove peel, with a second set of smaller wristlet gloves hidden beneath it that are never removed.
- How does this connect back to the theme? Well, there are multiple layers to anxiety — and even when we shed some of it or deal with one aspect of it, we don’t entirely get RID of it. Another layer or complexity of it can be hidden beneath the surface. Some of it lingers and remains, no matter how much we attempt to shed it. And that is what those two pairs of gloves represent.
- Fourth: When I did the first glove reveal (of my right hand), I used a fairly classic burlesque glove peel move of doing it in front of my chest…
- …but while I was doing that, I was popping my chest at the same time, really emphasizing the heavy breathing of being in an overly-stimulated state that can come with anxiety.
- I then also slide the glove across my neck, illustrating the sort of strangling experience that can happen, when it feels like anxiety is attacking or choking you, making it difficult to breathe.
- Fifth: After that glove peel, there was a moment of calm before the storm.
- My character tosses the glove aside, and appears to relax and look pleased with themselves, thinking they’ve dealt with the anxiety… only to see the left glove is still on, and then look at the right hand and discover — to her horror! — that the anxiety is still there in the form of that previously-hidden wristlet glove.
- This is SO common when you have anxiety! You might think you’ve dealt with it, only for it to crop up in a new or unexpected way.
- Sixth: For my second glove peel, I chose to do it in a rather unconventional way by positioning one knee on the chair, tucking the fingers of the glove under my knee, and using that tension to peel the glove up and off.
- What I like about this glove reveal is that it shows how you can make your own path; anxiety doesn’t show up the same way for every person (or even every situation!), so *how you handle it* might vary considerably. Sometimes, that involves getting creative or thinking outside the box, or using non-traditional methods.
- Seventh: There’s a move in which I’m perched on the chair, reaching in one direction and then another, before launching out of the chair and taking a few steps away.
- This illustrates the push-pull tension that’s often present with anxiety.
- Eighth: In another piece of the choreography, I flip upside down on the chair: my legs are in the air, and I’m hanging off it, literally upside down.
- The symbolism here is twofold: Anxiety can make you feel like you’re upside down, and also, sometimes we need to shift our perspective before we are able to heal our relationship with anxiety.
- Ninth: I’m barefoot in this act.
- That doesn’t happen very often! Usually I wear dance heels. But this act felt right to do barefoot, to illustrate that nakedness, that rawness, the pervasiveness way in which anxiety feels very intimate — AND ALSO, there’s the underlying idea that grounding ourselves can help us to work through our anxieties.
- Tenth: There are a lot of “creeping” movements involved in the choreography.
- At one point I literally crawl, or creep, on the floor toward the audience; at several other points I use my fingers to creep up my body from ankles to neck. Anxiety can affect all parts of the body! And it really can creep up or sneak up on us. It can also feel like it’s engulfing or surrounding us fully, which we also see several times when I’m doing a self-embrace.
- Toward the very end, my character is smiling even when we see the fingers creeping up the body again; this time, it’s much more of an, “I see you there, you don’t have power over me, I understand you’re trying to help, we can be friends,” kind of attitude.
So, there you go! Some symbolism and meaning extrapolated from a burlesque performance. Burlesque is a rich text and there is SO MUCH to be analyzed in it, so much meaning that we can extract from it — this is one fun example of what that can look like.
As with any form of media, we can also watch burlesque and be purely entertained by it. We do not have to seek the underlying meaning and symbolism to it, but just because we might be enjoying it from an entertainment standpoint doesn't mean that the symbolism and the meaning isn't there. There is so much value in both experiences!
If you are interested in attending a burlesque show (I would absolutely 10 out of 10 recommend doing it), what I would kind of encourage you to do is, after attending the show — maybe not in the moment because you want to be able to fully appreciate it and be immersed in that experience, but maybe after the show — think about what that act was about, and what are some of the different aspects of the symbolism and meaning that you might have interpreted from it. I would also encourage you to have a conversation about this: If you go to a show with other people, talk to them about it, like doing a “book club” discussion afterwards. You can do a little discussion about what you got from that particular performance versus what someone else got from it. You might have had very different perspectives on it.
You might also extrapolate a different meaning than what was part of the artist's intention, and that's okay too. For example, if you happened to be at this show and you saw my Personification of Anxiety act, maybe there's something in it that you were like, "Oh, that is so clearly a metaphor for anxiety” that I actually didn't mention in this episode. That does not take away from your experience of it, or from the symbolism or the meaning, because *once we create art and it is made public for public consumption, it gets to belong to all of us* in the sense that we all interact with it differently, and we get something out of it, we make meaning of it, in different ways.
The meaning that you find from any art form — burlesque, books, a painting, a movie, anything truly, a song, whatever it might be — the meaning that you get from it is absolutely valid, and I think that there's just a lot of value when you can have, again, kind of like a book club discussion where you can talk about your interpretations of it and get to hear other people's perspectives. That really gives us a very well-rounded understanding of some of the possibilities of what this piece of art might mean, and we can understand how other people's brains work by having those conversations with them. We can forge deeper connections with one another and the world at large. We can increase our understanding of all kinds of different topics in doing so; there is so so much! I could talk at length about this. There is just so much. Again, these things can be such rich text by really exploring meaning making and symbolism for just about anything, and that is so beautiful. This is part of what being human is all about.
If you haven’t watched the video of my Personification of Anxiety solo yet, you can check it out on my burlesque Instagram account: @BabeMaverick. I’ll share that link in the show notes of this episode.
Before we wrap up this episode, I’d love to ask a favour from you… Do you know people who would enjoy this episode? Awesome! Sharing is caring, so please do share this episode with someone who would benefit from it — or, post the link on social media so more people can tune in.
Thanks for helping me out! I appreciate you.
