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Burlesque Hour The Famous Spiegeltent Mon 27 Feb, season closed 'The Burlesque Hour' is a discomforting conglomeration of sort-of ugly, always topical, and mostly very pointed caricature. The show shifts through a succession of high and low Burlesque acts and achieves great effect in its emphatic incongruity. Apart from the obligatory contrast between style and content, the outstanding all-female cast cleverly sever any likely connections between audience expectations and desires and what is actually presented. Each act begins in a manner that suggests the conventional, but every time is abruptly ripped to reveal sights and sounds entirely unexpected and, more often than not, exhilaratingly off-putting. The deception mostly works, at best exposing latent audience anxieties and allowing performers to toy with freshly defenceless minds. Fortunately these professional sense-and-mind manipulators are socially responsible citizens, ensuring captive audiences are instructed against the consumerism, anti-consciousness, and sterility of ultra-pop mass-culture and on the merits of diversity, spontaneity and imperfection. Yumi Umiumare's manic twee-schoolgirl saltations are the highlight, slyly juxtaposing youth and innocence with a plastic-sexuality and, more than anything else in the show, luring to surface some of the most murky and complex of human desires. Not surprisingly it is greeted with the most laughter. Problems seem to emerge in transitions, with almost every act ending awkwardly and followed by an eerie silence before the next pocket of craziness explodes. In effect the general flow of the show is a little clumsy. But the genius of everything else renders this peripheral.  |
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