Vivi Valentine and Australia's Burlesque Ball 2009

Vivi Valentine is one big tease. Ask the former dancer and fashion student turned burlesque artiste what act she'll be unveiling at The Burlesque Ball and she says: "I have a known love of pink, so one of my acts is tapping into a popular pink bird that's also a popular bird of mine. I'm going back to my ballet training for that."

Her second act will also draw on her dance background - Valentine spent years learning contemporary dance and ballet - but comes with a cabaret-style twist.

The Burlesque Ball, which started in 2005 and this year tours to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, presents leading Australian and international burlesque acts. Valentine says performers will put their best foot (and more) forward in order to impress not only the audience but their peers.

"There's a very standard burlesque show that most people get into. Now that we've all been doing those for a while, we're looking at spicing things up a bit.

"For me, that means bringing in more of my background, which is dance training, otherwise it's just everybody doing fan dances," she says.

Valentine, of Sydney, has been performing burlesque since 2006. The first time she was asked to do it she refused, thinking she was being asked to perform a striptease.

"A couple of months later I was asked again and I put together what I would now call a vaudeville-style performance," she says.

"It didn't have the striptease element but it definitely had the bombastic burlesque sexual innuendo. When I got over the shyness thing of being up on stage and doing something slightly cheeky, it's like all the doors opened."

Valentine now makes a full-time living from burlesque - something she says wouldn't have been possible without US performer Dita von Teese single-handedly lobbing burlesque firmly into the mainstream. She's also grateful for Sydney burlesque agencies and promoters, including Burlesque Ball organiser Jac Bowie, who "came in and gave it a standard - talking about amounts that you may be able to consider living on".

While Valentine's hardly rolling in it, she can afford to pay not only for a roof over her head but the luxury of an inner-city studio. "Everything I earn goes into costumes and paying for my studio," she says. "It's not something I even blink at - when you're having so much fun, you're happy to not be able to go out and buy cocktails at night with your friends."

Valentine's right up there among the best but the headline act at the ball is New Yorker Amber Ray, a curvaceous beauty, coquettish singer and former stripper.

One of her acts will be a classic 1950s-style showgirl number while the other has an animal theme (think bunny, maybe, or pussycat).

"I've been working two to four gigs a week for almost the past decade . . . so I've got to the point where I'm comfortable in my own skin," Ray whispers over the phone (she's got a sore throat from singing). "I want every woman [in the audience] to look at me and feel what I'm feeling. Then I want their boyfriends to look at me and go, 'Oh my God, that's how my girlfriend is feeling right now.' I want this chain reaction of sensuality that completely sets them on fire."

Ray says burlesque communities are popping up all over the US, including in her native Milwaukee, but she's grateful to be in New York. "It's such an incredible scene here because everyone feeds off each other but in a very natural and sweet way - it's not like anybody would ever, ever steal anybody else's act," she says.

Bowie travels the world sourcing acts for her showcase, which features two 90-minute sets of performances and emulates the atmosphere of a secret gentlemen's club in 1940s Paris.

"I saw Amber in New York on a number of occasions and I was just blown away," Bowie says. "She's so confident and so powerful."

Bowie says she started the ball because "I've always been a lover of burlesque but I was always eternally disappointed at that time with what was going on in Sydney. I really wanted to see very high-end burlesque.

"I wanted to take it up a notch - it just coincided with the resurgence in burlesque."
by Katrina Lobley