Dance Dance Revolution

(page 5 of 7)

On October 12, 2007, Brown Girls Burlesque presented “The Jimi Experience” at a small club in the financial district. “We were ready to high-five each other if we got 50 or 75 people out,” Warren says. Instead, 250 people mobbed the club. Logistically, the outpouring of people was chaos, says Warren: Neither the club nor the performers were prepared. There was only one bartender and one door person, and another act had been booked in the same time slot. But once the show started, the energy in the room was terrific. The audience screamed and cheered. “There was a hunger for what we were doing,” Vargas explains. “Everyone was ready for it.”

The ladies of BGB were exhilarated. An off-Broadway theatre invited them to a residency, and they performed a half-dozen shows there over the next several months. While they were at it, they refined the group’s structure to allow for both coherent leadership and creative leeway. Crandell became the artistic director, but another member of the group curates each show, helping to develop the theme and choreographing the group finale.

Their performances also caught the attention of the media. The New York Post did a video feature on BGB’s second show and posted it on their Web site. Bust magazine, a national, feminist publication, did a story in their February 2008 issue, and the group was featured in the “Black Girls Rule” issue of Trace (a magazine of “transcultural style”) last summer.