Lit Fest’s Burlesque: “Taking it All Off” – Poetically

10 May Lit Fest’s Burlesque: “Taking it All Off” – Poetically

This is the razor’s edge. It is the line between sexuality, tease, and the real deal, the raw, cutthroat gulp where performance meets poetry, where neo-Burlesque meets memoir, where fiction flies like a dove from a magic hat.

This is the Ah Haa School’s Friday, May 16 event “Take It All Off: An Evening of Literary Burlesque,” part of the inaugural Telluride Literary Arts Festival, Thursday, May 15- Sunday, May 18. Conceptualized by award-winning author Amy Irvine McHarg, Literary Burlesque brings six regional writers together (the sixth is a guy) on stage to perform their most vulnerable work, peeling back layers to reveal tender hearts, tender words, bare souls, and a little bit of skin.

Amy McHarg by Susie Grant

“The idea of ‘literary burlesque’ was largely inspired by Telluride Theater’s Burlesque Show, of which I am a great fan,” explains Amy Irvine McHarg. “What Sasha Sullivan, Christopher Beaver, and others have done in that show is ask how a woman can truly reveal herself within the cultural constructs of sexuality and entertainment – and in doing so, they demolished those projections and assumptions entirely.

“But the notion for a literary version came to me this winter,” she continues,  “on an evening in New Hampshire, where I was part of a group of women authors who were all reading very vulnerable and revealing work, and I thought, ‘Wow, we do a kind of burlesque up here too.’”

McHarg started thinking about how they could intensify that vulnerability, “how much more honest and exposed we could be, if we took what we do with our writing and made the removing of layers, of stories, more visual.”

Enter fellow regional writers Kierstin Bridger, Ellen Marie Metrick, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and Sarah Gilman, plus Colorado author Craig Childs, and kismet: Telluride Literary Burlesque was born.

“It was so exciting to feel this incredible sisterhood, and brotherhood, around this idea of taking the writing to the core of who we are, to risk revealing everything in words, but also in the visual realm – with costumes, and projected imagery,” explains McHarg. “The result has been electric; none of us is who we were before we began to create this performance. I think the audience may experience some of that too, for we have, with a deep bow to Telluride Theater’s Burlesque tradition, turned the genre of burlesque inside out. Indeed, we have turned ourselves inside out, in asking what it means to be the female form beyond story, exposed, in her fear and wounds and rage and desire.” 

McHarg first pitched the idea to her close friend and colleague Craig Childs, who is already scheduled to teach Telluride LitFest’s “Raising the Dead: A Walking Celebration of Landscape and Literature” with McHarg on Saturday, May 17. For Burlesque, McHarg asked Childs to stand in as “pimp” so to speak, and impromptu storyteller. He jumped right in.

Craig Childs by Sarah Gilman, Literary Burlesque’s emcee/pimp

“I didn’t really think about what I was getting into, as usual,” he says. “That’s why I said yes.”

When Childs invited fellow Paonia-based writer and High Country News associate editor Sarah Gilman to participate, she decided to embrace the opportunity to challenge herself to be vulnerable on stage while simultaneously challenging the audience to re-think what vulnerability means.

Sarah Gilman by Craig Childs

“As a shy person who’s learned to be extroverted by necessity… I’ve always admired and envied the willful vulnerability of onstage performers,” Gilman explains. “It has also long irked me that vulnerability is so often construed as invitation for sexual comment, advance or even abuse, especially for women – including from people you trust and consider friends. Bare skin is invitation. The visible shape of your body is invitation. Being alone is invitation.”

For her part, Ridgway-based writer Kierstin Bridger had a lot more resistance to the idea: “I had an incredibly difficult time at first trying to square the racy, lacy trope of burlesque to my own sensibility,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how to participate in the event without compromising myself, my ideals, and my politics. I had to write myself a way into this show. I had to push up against every notion I had of why this was a bad idea. I wanted nothing to do with strip tease but I wanted everything to do with the conversation these particular women were having with vulnerability, risk, stripping off layers, …”

Kiersten Bridger

Bridger ultimately jumped in, and will in fact open the show with her “Strip Lesson for Literary Burlesque,” in which she wears full dominatrix regalia.

“Saying yes to this project meant saying yes to going full tilt, to going all the way, pressing all the hot buttons I had on my dash,” she says. “It was incredibly freeing and generative of new work. Collaborating with these writers to design the structure of the show was a wildly enthralling process of letting go and acting on instinct.”

When San Miguel County’s two-term Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer said yes to Literary Burlesque, she adds, “I had no idea what I was getting into and just how revealing it might be. I would like to think I would still have said yes, even knowing how vulnerable I would become. Working with the other women inspired me to take risks with my own writing … what a fantastic, terrifying gift!”

Rosemerry Trommer, by Darby Ullyat

Along with most of the other women, Trommer will perform three acts. Her first piece, ‘Wild Rose Chooses a Tail,’ features her alter ego, Wild Rose. “She oozes confidence in every arena where I am embarrassed or scared,” Trommer says. Her second poem, “After He Leaves the Emperor,” conveys “the sense of entrapment, the loneliness and the fear of being truly seen that come along with eating disorders” as well as people’s “potentially dysfunctional relationships toward ideals of beauty.” And her last poem, “If I Needed You,” shows the opposite side of Wild Rose, “the woman, me, who is willing to stand in front of you in her most wildly vulnerable state. The woman who is willing to say I am hurt and broken and imperfect and here I am, ready to love and be loved. I believe this willingness to be vulnerable is ultimately the path toward intimacy and happiness, though it is not pretty, nor easy. But real.”

Fellow poet and past San Miguel County Poet Laureate Ellen Marie Metrick interjects, “I am in awe of the work this group has done together. It is not just that we collaborate with ease, grace, and genuine openness; it is also that every individual who is involved in this project has intentionally, with a steely inner strength and desire, carved out a womb-space in extremely busy lives for this project to grow.”

Metrick has a lot of experience doing performance poetry, but this project spoke to her from a deeper place.

“This performance is different from any other I have ever experienced, which is also why I am here. It’s not big-city charged slam poetry, and it’s not backstreet half-asleep open mic; this performance doesn’t suffer from the often over-polished scrim of academic writing, and it is not the easy, familiar reading of words in a well-lit room with friends. Instead, this is an exploration of soul, of the depths to which open-heart performance and words lifted from the page can dive when each sustains and enlivens the other.”

Ellen Metrick by Kit Hedman

Metrick’s three poems for Literary Burlesque arise from three eras of her life, “from three layers in which I have, and perhaps still do, exist,” she says. “The poems each mark waypoints in my descent into soul.”

Similarly, McHarg’s performance piece came from the study of her own dreams, “which are always trying to show me who I am and who I am not,” she says. In three acts, “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” “Paradiso,” McHarg chips away at her “Fire Woman” persona to reveal what is underneath, accessing the very deepest part of her soul. From that place can be found “the essence of who I am beneath all the stories, the blue heron girl who can stand in all her ferocity and grace, in a way that makes her vulnerability her greatest strength. And indeed, just writing through these layers, learning to embody them before others, has allowed that bird into my consciousness in a very real way.”

McHarg’s final transformation closes the show in a powerfully vivid and naked way. Those who attend the show will see a side of these writers unlike anything they have ever seen as they challenge and transform ideas about sensuality, sexuality, and the female body.

Literary Burlesque begins at 8 p.m. sharp, at the Ah Haa School at The Depot, 300 S. Townsend. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information on the show and biographies and photos of the performers, go to ahhaa.org.