“There is a price that you may pay for your art”

Lottie Ellington,
Virginia’s Infamous “Twerking Teacher”
A Contemporary Burlesque Interview

Often we assume the censoring of women's bodies in burlesque is of days gone by, but in my book & research I have  personally interviewed plenty of currently working showgirls & showpersons to display a contemporary glimpse at the current environment we dance in, whether in burlesque or stripclubs, and the stigma and issues we face, and what we pay to be our true selves in the industry. 
Bellow is an excerpt from an interview with Lottie Ellington:

With big doe eyes, and an even bigger smile, Lottie Ellington has been dancing since she was 4. She has studied jazz, hoop dance, hip hop dance, fan dance, Congolese dance, ballroom dance and belly dance.In her college years She had tried Stripclub work with her classmates & bandmates, but ultimately decided it was not for her, years later Burlesque was the alternative that was a perfect fit instead. She also is a lifelong 5th generation teacher & founder of the Ellington Academy of Burlesque. She is well known for her comedic acts and nerdlesque parodies with fringe & sparkle. But what she is most infamous for is her perseverance when an injustice was committed against her. 
On april 15th of 2011, Lottie entered the (now closed) Richmond Institute of Burlesque. She pursued multiple drop in classes, soaking up as much information as she could for a hobby in her offtime as an educator at a local school. When one had taken enough drop in classes, one could perform in the recital. Lottie flourished with her natural abilities and is quickly coming onto her Decade in Burlesque Anniversary, a milestone many showgirls do not reach before they drop out or leave it behind as a brief hobby. “I really kinda I just figured I would do this once or twice, and that would be it.” Lottie said smiling. It was fun, she could express herself in an art, in her own time, just for her. But how did the Internet come to know her as The Twerking Teacher? It happened five years into her showgirling timeline, in spite of being very vigilant and ever conscious of keeping her “Muggle Life” and her entertaining life very seperate. The stigma against women in the arts having bodily agency as a form of free expression, even in modernity, is heavily watched and instilled, twice fold for educators of the youth, thrice fold for women of colour.  “There was some dust up in my local burlesque community., “ She started to explain about the beginning of the turn of events in Richmond,  “Regarding race, and I kind of spoke up, I'm an older performer & I don't have, like, a thing to lose. I didn't think I had anything to lose….” She did the emotional labour a lot of women of colour in vaudeville are doing recently, when addressing problematic things said in local industries. Modern Burlesque is supposed to be a safe space for female and femme presenting humans to be in an artistic community within the industry. This is not always the case and call ins & call outs do not always have mutually respected results. “so I was like, ‘Hey, this is not OK. Don't do this. We need to find something else to do with yourself in your time other than make racial posts about other people's ethnicity.’ And apparently that hurt someone's feelings.” an admirer of the colleague she was trying to help educate took their energy and instead channeled into an anonymous email sent to the school board a link to a video from the 2014 Michigan Burlesque Festival. It received more than 7,500 views and the town flooded with controversy, ostracising a confident & educated woman who dared to have an expressive artistic side. It did not fit the perfect myth of what a teacher, a woman, was allowed to be. This went viral as parents demanded her to be fired. The press spread so far as to Lottie waking up to see her showgirl persona images on Yahoo homepage as a news article.She was forced to resign.But Lottie took it in stride; “one of the many news articles that was written on it, the headline was "Parents Say Fire Twerking Teacher." And that's kind of how it stuck.'' Usually in vaudeville, burlesque in particular, a performer has a tagline for flyers and when emcees introduce them to follow their stage name. Taglines are often given by peers, mentors, masters of ceremonies, or even well self curated for marketing plans when thinking of oneself as a brand as well as an artist. But in some cases, rarely, one can get it from a press review. But Lottie, got hers from a headline. “well, I didn't get to pick my tag line, and no one that I admire gave me my tag line; legitimately, a newspaper, a journalists gave me my tag line.” Her resilience to move forward another five years in burlesque with this new tagline was admirable. She resigned from her Highschool teaching position unfortunately. “it's set and it definitely sucks. But, you know, things. Everything happens for a reason. And again, it kind of gave me a chance To kind of just step out of my comfort zone and do something else. Because ultimately, it's like all. Well, you still have you're not teaching anymore, but you still have credentials. So put your credentials to use in a different way.” She said, during 2020, the year she announced her new academy that will usher in a new generation of performers. I was honoured to listen before we tackled discussing the Body Policing and legalities of the local burlesque scene. 
Where most cities or counties feature Blue Laws and are generally enforced by regular uniformed police department officers, Richmond has “ABC Agents.” ABC stands for Alcohol Beverage Control. Lottie had already experienced an ABC situation up close and personal. She was working as a door girl at a recital for burlesque school she was learning from. An ABC agent came in and was prepared to shut the production down. “The producers were able to kind of talk them down, ‘Oh no please we are almost done, that, you know, just let us finish. This is a recital. Let them finish’” Lottie recalled, “And they said, ‘we'll let you finish, but this is it.’ And they talk to be owner of the venue and then told them that they know they weren't licensed for this.” The ABC agent threatened that the venue could lose their license over having burlesque performers dance in their venue. Where a thriving burlesque scene had sprung up in various bars, to which Lottie described as the WIld WIld West at the time, suddenly doors were closing to performers and producers. “Then after that, no one was willing to do it. So we were literally just relegated to only the Theatres and art galleries” Lottie remembered, as spaces for performances ran dry, and previous relationships producers and teachers had developed with venue owners quietly became standstills. “So that was that was it. So if there was a theater that would allow you to come in and you could do it, then. And if it was an art gallery, you could do it. But if it was this that you couldn't do any. Couldn't do bars. Couldn't do restaurant. And law didn't specifically say you couldn't. But no one was willing to take that chance at that time.” But both theatres and art galleries are expensive to rent and arrange a performance in, which meant only some could move forward with having their art seen. Which created more potential for imbalance of who got to grow and develop skills as burlesque artists and who did not. But this also showed who could be ingenuitive and who had creativity and drive to research the laws, adjust their performances, and persevere. In some areas of Virginia you couldn’t be seen in some types of venues taking your clothes off, so one asks “How Does One EVEN DO BURLESQUE Without Taking Clothes Off?” Lottie was strategic, and even used a classic burlesque solution from eras gone by, “So then you have to kind of work around the rules and say, ‘OK, well, you can't be seen taking off clothes. So here's a screen. You can go behind the screen. Take off your clothes or you don't wear clothes and you do like a balloon pop. Because those aren't clothing. those aren't clothes” Balloons are not clothes. The Balloon pop act is a classic work around, a legal loophole with purpose. “That was interesting because you kind of see a lot of novelty acts and you think ‘oh god, a balloon pop. So cute.’ But then you find out later, ‘oh, there is not a balloon pop for the sake of balloon pop.’ It's a balloon pop because you can't STRIP. And so that's the way of getting around the whole not being able to strip.” 
  ABC Agents while not police officers, they still carry a badge and they can make arrests, according to Lottie, which incurs an additional stress upon POC performers. Any arrest of a person of colour has high risk. The amount of POC who experience brutality, abuse and even death while in custody or pre custody of police is alarming. “Black bodies are already heavily enforced and policed. So now you put on top of this. You know, again, this black body that is in these degrees of being naked. And this becomes a huge issue. Again, Paris Hilton has a nip slip on the on the red carpet, and no one batted an eye, Janet Jackson had a nip slip at the Super Bowl & it was like, It was career ending for her.” She explained “You have to understand that there is a price that you may pay for your art. And that the the rules may not be, you know, are not always equally. The consequences and the rules, the rules may not be equally applied. And I think for POCs we noticed the harder part is trying to get allies and counterparts to grasp that concept. So instead of "you can you know, we've been doing this burlesque thing at this venue for a long time." Well, have you ever done it with the person of color at the venue? No. OK, well, then you might want to check on that because. You've been getting away with it for all of this time and no one said anything, but if I do it, I might go to jail.” A risk that she’s been taking over and over for almost a decade. Which caused Lottie to be extra vigilant about her art and costuming, filtering a lot of what she does to adjust to the risk, while still pushing the envelope. “Again, this is part of living in America is having to police yourself so that other people don't have the opportunity to police you. Where to minimize how much other people have to feel like they need to, Police you, because you're already trying to be on point. I've got to make sure that my butt doesn't fall out of my shorts, even though my butt falls out of all of my shorts, out of ALL the shorts. Because this is an ABC agent at the venue, then I've got to be extra careful.”
     “So they can arrest you. And they have a badge. And they come again, they come in sort of. Flex their muscles. You know, occasionally.” But Lottie says that she is seeing improvements over the last few years with less interference from this strange body of authority. Even venues have started to edge quietly back to being open to having burlesque return to their spaces. “Things have definitely opened up more.” Lottie said, “more and more venues are willing to take a chance.So that was a wonderful change to see happen in comparison to when I first started, where the ABC agents came in and literally just shut everything down.”
And now she is a leader in a community within an industry still going strong. She will be using her skills as a teacher to be an educator for the Ellington School of Burlesque, The Twerking Teacher still inspiring with a fighting spirit, a scholar of sparkle. 

To read more about Lottie, her contemporary Colleagues, And the living and passed legends who came before us to trail blaze, stay tuned for the release of Policing Muses available at Barnes & Noble this fall!