Mira Fuchs

Mira Fuchs is a stripper.  The show is about stripping and being a stripper.  ‘Being’?  Working as.  Performing as.  Mira Fuchs’ creator, Melanie Jame Wolf, has been a club stripper and lap dancer for eight years, so she knows whereof she speaks – and dances.

As if to remove any hint of the erotic, Mira Fuchs walks into the centre of a circle of chairs on which her initially somewhat bemused audience (restricted to maximum 28) sits, all of us aware of each other.  She immediately strips totally naked in a brisk, matter-of-fact way.  But then she pulls on a translucent, flesh-coloured body stocking.  It’s an interesting but possibly necessary decision in the light of what follows.

This is a most intimate show and in the course of it, Mira Fuchs/Ms Wolf will make deliberate eye contact and speak with all of us.  Further, subject to individual agreement, each audience member may experience a lap dance – a further remove, in fact, from the erotic.  Her movements each time are exactly the same mechanical, ritualised clichés, performed here in a brightly lit room, with no music, no noise, no alcohol and under the tensely interested observation of the rest of the audience.  But this ‘performance’ is what the lap dancer does - as the Voice Over sound track tells us.  Over and over.  Literally thousands of times across the years.  The sociological and satiric implications are clear.

In fact, the show is about a lot more than stripping per se – it is about the implications, psychology (of strippers and club patrons), semiotics and economics - as Ms Wolf explains in her program notes.  From those notes, you might think that her show would be capital ‘A’ Art of the solemn, difficult, deep and meaningful’ sort.  Well, it is not at all solemn; it is sharp, satirical and at times laugh-out-loud funny.  It is ‘difficult’ in that it is challenging and confronting.  It raises real questions about women’s bodies and their presentation, about representations of sexuality and male responses to that, and about the sheer hard work in performing as a stripper.  We learn that it is performance, it is role playing – but that the need to perform can be overpowering.  It is the succinct analysis, the wit and the finely calculated choreography in this show that are unexpected. 

Ms Wolf employs her own body – writhing, twisting, arching - plus rap, text, text on big opposing screens, a video interview with herself, a demystifying video of a body part, a song, and short dissertations on sex, drugs, money and girls.  There’s an anecdote about an ‘acquaintance’, an academic, who considers herself far superior to Mira.  In one of the most amusing and scathingly accurate segments, Ms Wolf dons a white lab coat and glasses, ties her tempestuously tossed stripper hair into a pony tail and tells us she is a scientist – which she is, in the sense that she has conducted the same ‘experiment’ over and over with the same result.  Using a white board, she analyses the dynamics, behaviour and personalities of ‘the pack’: a group of five strip club patrons – the Alpha, the Beta, the two Foot Soldiers and the Hanger-On Terrier – that last the avowed enemy of the Stripper.  The audience laughs but is convinced.

Elsewhere her comments on the naff, nervous, misdirected, faux-friendly, demeaning and reductive comments and questions of her customers reveal the absurdity of it all.  For instance, ‘What’s your name?  …No, what’s your real name?’  Or when the stripper has removed her g-string and her vagina is inches from the bloke’s nose, ‘So, er, what’re you studying?’  

Unsurprisingly, it’s not all laughs.  The ironies are sometimes very black.  Drugs?  A matter of access.  Sex?  A matter of access.  Money?  It’s a matter of access.  Finally, ‘Mira’ chooses someone she likes from the audience (at the show I saw, an attractive woman), moves them to the centre and, this time with insistent music, performs her last lap dance topless – and suddenly it is erotic.  This segment is called ‘Desire’.  It is disturbing in a different way, adding yet another layer to this already complex and surprisingly provocative presentation.

Michael Brindley

Image: Melanie Jame Wolf - Photographer: Bryony Jackson.