Les Filles de Joie is a troupe of dancing girls who aim to bring burlesque back to the music halls of Paris. Every weekend, they give lessons to anyone who’s ever had the urge to flutter a feather fan or twirl a nipple tassel.
On stage at La Bellevilloise nightclub in Paris, Charlotte is having a wardrobe malfunction. But the problem isn’t that her sequin-covered bra has slipped – it’s that it won’t come off.
“Don’t worry about it, just untie the straps sooner,” calls her instructor, choreographer Lolaloo des Bois.
Meanwhile, downstairs, around 30 women of all ages are learning the Dance of seven veils from another professional burlesque dancer.
School is in session at the Ecole des Filles de Joie. On the syllabus: striptease and French cancan, but also tap, modern jazz, acrobatics, stage make-up and costume design.
Some students will come just once, for the novelty or a special occasion, like the hen party taking part in the beginners’ class. Others, like Charlotte, come back every week and eventually perform alongside the professionals in the Filles de Joie’s monthly revue.
They are among a growing number of people practising, performing and enjoying burlesque dance.
As of 2009, Paris has its own annual burlesque festival, while this year’s Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival went to Mathieu Amalric for On Tour, his film about a burlesque troupe making their way around France.
The Filles de Joie are part of a proud tradition of French sauciness, explains the troupe’s charismatic founder, Juliette Dragon.
“The first striptease was in Pigalle [in north Paris] actually, in 1893 in Jardins Japonais. So it’s an old French tradition to have les petites femmes de Paris, oh la la!”
Even as the form had its heyday in mid-20th-century America, Juliette says, many of the dancers chose Gallic-sounding names to give themselves “ze French touch”.
But while the birthplace of the cancan, the Moulin Rouge, now caters chiefly to wealthy tourists, Juliette says her dancing girls have the popular appeal of their earliest predecessors. It costs 150 euros to see a show at the Moulin Rouge, she points out, compared to just four euros for the Filles de Joie.
But the main thing that makes the Filles de Joie stand out, both from the highly trained beauty queens at the Moulin Rouge, or the strippers at the sex shops in Paris’ nearby red-light district, is that they’re not all professional dancers.
“The girls play not just because they’re going to earn money and they have to, they play because they want to and it’s a real pleasure to do it,” says Juliette.
Like many performers of so-called neo-burlesque, Juliette insists on the inclusive and empowering nature of the striptease she teaches.
“I decided to create this school because I wanted to encourage girls to become women,” she says.
“It’s quite forbidden to be sexy and clever in our society, so I wanted to explain how to be sexy and glamorous with a lot of humour, and have lots of fun with our sexiness.”
Empowerment is often used to justify female (near) nudity, with varying degrees of persuasiveness. It’s probably not what feminists had in mind when they first exhorted women to cast off their bras, but Juliette’s conviction is hard to resist.
“We know that [the students] can be so, so sexy and beautiful even if they don’t look like the TV programmes,” she says, beaming. “If you’re big, or slim, or even really tiny, who cares? The only important point is to feel comfortable in your body. Because your body is absolutely perfect, because it’s yours and it’s the only one.”
It’s not all about the female form: at least half the appeal of burlesque lies in its spectacular costumes. And dressing-up can be an act of rebellion, as Rebecca, an American grad student and Filles de Joie regular, suggests.
It’s all about “fictions”, she explains: “I love this idea that you can make yourself who you want to be. You can wake up and say, I feel like a panther today, make yourself up like a panther, put on a leopard dress and you are a panther. And you can make your life in that way, whatever you want it to be.”
Gender theorists say that by adopting and exaggerating the codes and props of femininity, you expose the inherent artificiality of what we call “natural” female attributes.
Whether or not the Filles de Joie have this argument in mind as they don their corsets and false eyelashes, they’re certainly not aiming for physical perfection or unadulterated sexiness.
“I think for most of us here, it’s about the expression, the theatre – recounting a story,” says Charlotte, who has been who has been taking lessons for a year now while completing a PhD in history.
She’s lately started choreographing her own solos in the persona of Calamity Gin, a comic character whose dances invariably end in some kind of mishap. It’s not about arousing desire, she explains, but making people laugh.
“Obviously you are taking your clothes off and dancing, and it does make me feel sexy – but mostly I don’t take myself too seriously. I think that’s what [burlesque] is, learning to find the fun in being sexy.”
In that case, the Filles de Joie are aptly named. As Juliette explains, the phrase is an old-fashioned term for a prostitute – but it means literally “the girls of joy”.
“So we really want to give lots of entertainment and fun and joy to the audience – and I guess I can say it’s working.”
The Ecole des Filles de Joie is every Saturday at La Bellevilloise, and the Cabaret des Filles de Joie gives regular performances all over Paris. See www.collectif-surprise-party.com for details.
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