FUTURE WOMB BRINGS A TOUCH OF BURLESQUE
Songwriter and dancer in music video hope it shines light on art form
Back in late January 2019, a small crew gathered in a Calgary apartment to shoot a video for the Future Womb song TGIF.
Within a couple of hours, it was over. As anyone who has ever been involved in filming knows, this is a miraculously quick turnaround. On top of that, the two artistic disciplines that were intersecting that day — rock and roll and burlesque — are perhaps not known for their businesslike efficiency.
Nevertheless, the shoot went off without a hitch.
“I set up a whole craft, food-snack area and nobody touched it,” says Mikaela Cochrane, the lead singer and songwriter of Future Womb, who was holding the shoot at her downtown apartment. “Nobody was there long enough to justify that. So I just ate it all, anxiously, in the corner while they filmed.”
There may have been some practical reasons for the smooth ride. It only had one performer: Calgary-born burlesque dancer Jezebel Sinclair. Shot by director
Tesh Guttikonda and director of photography Shae Paterson, it also unfolds in one take.
The resulting video, which came out earlier this month, offers some arresting visuals to Future Womb's beautiful, melancholy ballad. Cochrane, who moved to Vancouver not long after the shoot, was interested in bringing her first love to the video. Her involvement in burlesque predates Future Womb and those who have seen the band live know she often brings aspects of it into her performances. She had worked with Sinclair in the past in Alberta's tight-knit burlesque scene. She even booked Future Womb that same year to be the musical entertainment for Red Deer Riot Grrrl.
“I always like having some kind of nod to burlesque because it was so important (to) me finding my way to being a music performer,” Cochrane says.
Sinclair came up with the solitary dance performance at the heart of the video, which is shot against the backdrop of Calgary's skyline. Cochrane hopes the video, which can be seen on Youtube and Future Womb's website, offers outsiders a glimpse into the world of burlesque, which she thinks is often maligned and misunderstood.
Cochrane, who still performs as a burlesque dancer, says she encountered some resistance when she would invite friends to her burlesque shows.
“It felt like people were hesitant to come because of the assumed sexual side of it,” she says. “It was like if we weren't dating maybe they shouldn't come see me take off my clothes. A lot of my friends are such ... dudes, that maybe there was this confusion as to what it meant if I was inviting them. There's all this heteronormative bullsh--. It seems like people were scared to come.”
Sinclair, who now lives in Edmonton, began performing burlesque eight years ago. Self-described in her bio as a “fat queerdo,” she has been challenging the status quo in burlesque and beyond ever since.
She said creating the dance piece based on her interpretation of Cochrane's
lyrics was cathartic.
“This is the story of somebody who has gone through something that has pretty much destroyed them and they have gotten to the point where they can recognize what happened in the situation wasn't all bad,” she says. “It allows you to grow. It's like I'm healing from this and I hope you're healing as well.”
She hopes having burlesque tied to a relatively mainstream medium like the music video will expose more people to the art form, which is much more nuanced than many think, she says.
“Burlesque is underground and only seen in one way,” Sinclair says. “A lot of people see it as a very sexualized art form. But there is a lot more to that. Being somebody who is a larger body, having the visibility in that was also really important to me. We often think of burlesque and think of the traditional body like Dita Von Teese. But, in reality, burlesque has a lot of body diversity within it.”
The video for TGIF is available at futurewomb.com.