Strip Club - Wikipedia

Main article: Striptease § History

 

The term "striptease" was first recorded in 1938, though "stripping", in the sense of women removing clothing to entice men, seems to go back at least 400 years. For example, in Thomas Otway's comedy The Soldier's Fortune (1681) a character says: "Be sure they be lewd, drunken, stripping whores".[8] Its combination with music seems to be as old. A conclusive description and visualization can be found in the 1720 German translation of the French La Guerre D'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707), where a galant party of high aristocrats and opera singers has resorted to a small château where they entertain themselves with hunting, play and music in a three-day turn:

The third day, dedicated to ball and dance, was used for the finest entertainment to divert the men; their eyes were given the opportunity to see all the pleasures nature could offer; and if the pleasant aspects of a well shaped young lady are able to arouse the mind, one can say that our princes enjoyed all the delicacies of love. The dancers, to please their lovers the more, dropped their clothes and danced, totally naked, the nicest entrées and ballets; one of the princes directed the delightful music, and only the lovers were allowed to watch the performances.[9]

Other possible influences on modern stripping were the dances of the Ghawazee "discovered" and seized upon by French colonists in 19th century North Africa and Egypt. The erotic dance of the bee, performed by a woman known as Kuchuk Hanem, was witnessed and described by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In this dance, the performer disrobes as she searches for an imaginary bee trapped within her garments. It is likely that the women performing these dances did not do so in an indigenous context, but rather, responded to the commercial climate for this type of entertainment.[10]

Middle Eastern belly dance, also known as oriental dancing, was popularized in the United States after its introduction on the Midway at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago by a dancer known as Little Egypt.[11]

European tradition

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In France during the late 19th century, Parisian shows such as the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère were featuring attractive, scantily clad, dancing women and tableaux vivants.[12] In this environment, an act featuring a woman slowly removing her clothes in a vain search for a flea crawling on her body was seen in 1895 and possibly filmed in 1897 by the first female director, Alice Guy.[1][13] This routine, Le coucher d'Yvette, inspired "French acts" in theaters and brothels in other parts of the world, seen in New York as early as 1878.[1] The first public act of striptease in modern times is credited to Parisian theater in 1894.[14]

In 1905, Dutch dancer Mata Hari, later shot as a spy by the French authorities during World War I, was an overnight success from the debut of her act at the Musée Guimet.[15] The most celebrated segment of her act was her progressive shedding of clothing until she wore just a jeweled bra and some ornaments over her arms and head.[16] Another landmark performance was the appearance at the Moulin Rouge, in 1907, of an actress called Germaine Aymos, who entered dressed only in three very small shells.[17] In the 1930s, the famous Josephine Baker danced semi-nude in the danse sauvage at the Folies and other such performances were provided at the Tabarin.[18] These shows were notable for their sophisticated choreography and for often dressing the girls in glitzy sequins and feathers. By the 1960s, "fully nude" shows were provided at such places as Le Crazy Horse Saloon.[19]

 

In Britain in the 1930s, Laura Henderson began presenting nude shows at the Windmill Theatre in London. At that time, British law prohibited naked girls from moving. To avoid the prohibition, the models appeared in stationary tableaux vivants.[20] The Windmill girls also toured other London and provincial theatres, sometimes using ingenious devices such as rotating ropes to move their bodies round, though strictly speaking, staying within the letter of the law by not moving of their own volition.[21] Another example of ways that the shows stayed within the law was the fan dance, in which a naked dancer's body was concealed by her fans and those of her attendants, until the end of her act in when she posed naked for a brief interval whilst standing still.[21]

In 1942, Phyllis Dixey formed her own company of girls and rented the Whitehall Theatre in London to put on a review called The Whitehall Follies.[22][23] By the 1950s, touring striptease acts were used to attract audiences to the dying music halls. Paul Raymond started his touring shows in 1951 and later leased the Doric Ballroom in Soho, opening his private members club, the Raymond Revuebar, in 1958. This was the first of the private striptease members' clubs in Britain.[24]

Changes in the law in the 1960s brought about a boom of strip clubs in Soho with "fully nude" dancing and audience participation.[25] Pubs were also used as venues, most particularly in the East End, with a concentration of such venues in the district of Shoreditch. This pub striptease seems mainly to have evolved from topless go-go dancing.[26][self-published source?] Though often a target of local authority harassment, some of these pubs survive to the present day. A custom in these pubs is that the strippers walk round and collect money from customers in a beer jug before each individual performance. This custom appears to have originated in the late 1970s when topless go-go dancers first started collecting money from the audience as the fee for going "fully nude".[26] Private dances of a more raunchy nature are sometimes available in a separate area of the pub.[27]

American tradition

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In America, striptease started in traveling carnivals and burlesque theatres, and featured famous strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee and Sally Rand. The vaudeville trapeze artist Charmion performed a "disrobing" act onstage as early as 1896, which was captured in the 1901 Edison film, Trapeze Disrobing Act. Another milestone for modern American striptease was the possibly legendary show at Minsky's Burlesque in April 1925: The Night They Raided Minsky's. The Minsky brothers brought burlesque to New York's 42nd Street. However, the burlesque theatres there were prohibited from having striptease performances in a legal ruling of 1937, leading to the later decline of these "grindhouses" (named after the bump 'n grind entertainment on offer) into venues for exploitation cinema.[28] The concept of "strippers", as we know it today with the pole dance, has been popularized in the United States in 1972. British Columbia followed the lead around 1978.

Widespread bans on striptease had a direct influence on the creation of the strip clip joint and the exotic dancer as known today.[1] Bans still exist; enforced now mostly at the local municipal level. American-style striptease began to appear outside North America in the post-World War II era and is now practiced widely around the world.[1]

The 1960s saw a revival of striptease in the form of topless go-go dancing. Topless dancing was banned in certain parts of the country, similar to the bans on striptease, but it eventually merged with the older tradition of burlesque dancing.[1] Carol Doda, of the Condor Night Club in the North Beach section of San Francisco, is credited with being the first topless go-go dancer.[29] The club opened in 1964 and Doda's première topless dance occurred on the evening of 19 June of that year.[30][31] The large lit sign in front of the club featured a picture of her with red lights on her breasts. The club went "bottomless" on 3 September 1969; launching the trend of explicit "full nudity" in American striptease dancing.[32] It was Doda's brand of dancing which is credited with the move from striptease to stripping.[33]

San Francisco is also the location of the notorious Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre. Originally an X-rated movie theater, this striptease club pioneered lap dancing in 1970, and was a major force in popularizing it in strip clubs on a nationwide and eventually worldwide basis.[34] A further development in the American tradition took place with the emergence of upscale "gentlemen's clubs" in the early 1990s in large cities such as New York.[35] Scores New York was the first major gentlemen's club, with "a gorgeous interior, high-end food and drinks, and of course stunningly beautiful women in sexy gowns. Prior to that, live adult entertainment in New York consisted largely of seedy peep show-type places", according to adult industry veteran Joe Diamond.[35] San Francisco's Lusty Lady became known in the 1990s and early 2000s as the first strip club in the world to successfully unionize and the first to become a worker's cooperative.[36][37]

Asian tradition

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The Japanese term for strip club, nūdo gekijo, literally means "nude theater".[38] An older term was "sutorippu gekijo". American-style striptease became popular in Japan during the U.S. occupation after the end of World War II (1945–1952). Some girls chose to strip in theaters as an alternative to prostitution.[39]

When entrepreneur Shigeo Ozaki saw Gypsy Rose Lee perform, he started his own striptease revue in Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood. Teitoza was the first club to open in Shinjuku, on 15 January 1947. The first act was titled "The Birth of Venus".[38] Each performance lasted for fifteen seconds and was modest by modern standards, incorporating veils, panties and a bra which covered much of what would be shown today. The woman on stage stood in a stationary pose, similar to shows in Britain. The show ran until August 1948. Theaters in Asakusa had fully nude displays,[38] also featuring no motion or stripping. As this style of theater spread,[38] the removal of clothing on stage was integrated into the process.

Over time, as regulations were relaxed, a variety of acts developed with shows presenting a variety of movements, such as taking a bath in an outdoor washtub. One of the most famous variants had audience members given magnifying glasses for close up views.[38]

During the 1950s, Japanese "strip shows" became more sexually explicit and less dance-oriented, until they were eventually simply live sex shows.[1] The strip shows in Tokyo during this time remained low key, but Osaka and Kyoto were pushing the art of striptease in Japan into new territory.[40] In 1956, Osaka became the first city in Japan to have pubic hair on display during a strip show.[40] Dotonbori is a well known red light district in Osaka, Japan, that has featured entertainment theaters and prostitution for hundreds of years.[41][42][43][44] The strip clubs of today are the latest incarnation of its temptations.[41]

Peeping clubs, which feature peeping rooms (nozokibeya), are businesses similar to western peep shows. Customers in peeping clubs view a female model through a hole from their own private cubicles, and then pay to watch her strip, pose, and masturbate. Kabukichō, a red light district in Tokyo, had 13 nozoki-beya in the early 1980s.[45] The sex industry became so pervasive in Asia that by the 1990s, Kabukichō was described as a "warren of peep shows, strip clubs, and massage parlors" and Bangkok, Thailand, attained a reputation as the sex capital of the world.[46]