Naked truth
Combining comedy and striptease.
On the surface, British cabaret performer Ursula Martinez and I have very little in common. She’s tall, slender, half-Spanish, a lesbian feminist comedian and theatre sensation who has performed all over the world.
I am a chubby New Zealand heterosexual with zero stage skills who spends his days hunched over a computer keyboard, bolting words together.
But Martinez and I have one rare thing in common. We have both made our living in the nude.
‘‘Yes, it’s true!’’ she says from Melbourne, where she’s developing a new show. ‘‘Both of my parents were nudists, and I grew up as one, too. These days, most of my cabaret shows end up with me naked at some point.’’
I, on the other hand, have put my naked career behind me. But three decades ago, in Edinburgh, I spent a couple of years as a professional artists’ life model.
I would get up, get dressed, go to work, take my clothes off again. Art students would draw or paint me all day, then I would put my clothes back on and go home.
‘‘Ah, yes, I’ve done that job, too, a long time ago,’’ says Martinez. ‘‘Good on you for not being shy about it.’’
Oh, I was shy, alright. But I was also broke, so when I heard about the job, I was desperate enough to apply.
Martinez, meanwhile, still gets naked at the drop of a hat, and will be doing so next month in Auckland as part of an Arts Festival cabaret show called La Soiree.
‘‘Yes, and it’s a great show, too. La Soiree is a long-running circus and cabaret group I co-founded, so there are several other performers I’ve worked alongside before. I’ll be doing a comedy flamenco act that draws on my Spanish heritage, and also my infamous Hanky Panky routine that’s generated so much hoo-haa over the years.’’
The latter routine is indeed legendary. It’s a striptease version of the classic magic trick in which a magician makes a scrap of brightly coloured fabric disappear and reappear repeatedly.
In Martinez’s version, she removes a piece of clothing with each disappearance until she’s starkers. The final dramatic reappearance of the hanky has been alarming audiences all over the world for 17 years.
‘‘I think that show was the first time magic and striptease were ever put together, and people were always surprised by it. But then someone filmed the show 11 years ago and put it online without my permission. Suddenly, everything changed. I’d been performing Hanky Panky live for years without getting a single strange email from an audience member, but once someone filmed it, I was getting hundreds of them. Some of them were very freaky indeed.’’
Martinez was dismayed, irritated, a little scared. She felt she’d lost all control over the public response to her own act.
‘‘Part of what works about the act is that, despite being naked, I am in a high-status position and very obviously in charge. I’m manipulating the emotions of the audience. But once it goes online, the context is suddenly very different. People can watch it as often as they like, pause it, zoom in. It allowed some people out there to feed their own obsessions. The video even started to show up on porn sites.’’
This is surprising to me, having seen the act. Yes, her show involves nudity, but it’s profoundly unerotic, unless you consider any and all nudity to be a turn-on.
‘‘Exactly. But some people can’t make any distinction between a naked woman having fun with an ironic glint in her eye and something that’s deliberately sexual. I suddenly had people trying to book me to perform in strip clubs!’’
In the end, Martinez did what she has always done: turned her own frustrations, anxieties, and ideas about