A lesson from the spotlight…don’t let anyone stand in the way of your dreams. Get up on the stage, throw a bunch of rose petals in the air, and dance like everybody’s watching.
You know that nightmare everybody has had? The one where you are on stage, in front of an audience of friends/peers/strangers and you look down and you realise you are in your underwear, or worse, naked? Well, I do that. For real. When I’m awake. And the best bit? I get paid to do it.
If you had told me seven years ago that I would become a burlesque dancer, I would have said, in your dreams. Not in reality, because that would require a kind of confidence I simply didn’t have, the kind of confidence that, I presumed at the time, only comes with a body like Christina Aguilera’s.
I am a curvy girl with a capital C. I have struggled almost my whole adult life with my weight. Up and down like a yoyo, I am. I’ve accepted that, but for a long time I believed it meant that, when I was in a “fullness” phase, I was automatically precluded from doing certain things, like looking sexy on stage.
I have always been a performer, but it was made clear to me early on that what a girl of my amplitude was good for, was comedic relief and an occasional spectacularly belted power ballad. So the prospect of being almost naked in front of an audience, and that audience liking it, was simply not within my realm of possibilities.
Then, freshly arrived in Cape Town, I was invited by a new friend to attend her burlesque performance at a swanky bar in town. I watched, wide-eyed as she sauntered about the space, spilling rose petals from her bra, supremely confident in her own skin. I thought, “I could never do that, but I want to”.
We talked about how burlesque was about body positivity, about performance, not size. We talked about how burlesque was for the performer, not the audience. We talk a lot. I stewed over it for two years. Then I joined her dance school. Within a month I had done my first solo performance. Within a year, I was part of her professional troupe.
To be fair, the burlesque scene in South Africa cannot support a full time performer. All the professional performers I know have to supplement their incomes with other occupations. But being a professional means we get to take to the stage more often at a wide range of events, shows and functions, and it keeps us in enough money for sparkly new costumes and a bottle of bubbles backstage.
Despite that, becoming a professional burlesque dancer was still one of the best life choices I have ever made. I thought I would be doing it just for myself, for my own self confidence, and I was right. I realised that confidence doesn’t come from having the perfect body. It comes from loving the imperfect body you have. It comes from loving yourself, exactly as you are, curves and bumps and cellulite and all.
I also realised that audiences, contrary to popular belief, love you and your body, no matter what its shape. They love you for your confidence and your bravery, they love you for doing the thing they are not brave enough to do. They see the beauty in that vulnerability, and their appreciation teaches you to be braver still.
But perhaps the most surprising realisation came the first time an audience member came up to me after a show and said “Thank you! I wasn’t expecting to see someone like me on stage tonight. You’ve inspired me to start dancing and to love myself more.”
To be a role model for others, for women in the audience who, like me, were “fuller figured” and used to feeling socially precluded from being or feeling sexy and self confident – that is an amazing thing.
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