For sex clown and burlesque pioneer Glitta Supernova, there is more to her art than stripping off her clothes; she aims to peel away her audience’s taboos and social conditioning until they can proudly and shamelessly embrace the bare beauty of the human body.
Glitta will bring her award-winning show 'Body Map' to Adelaide to celebrate the Feast Festival’s coming of age, as it celebrates its 21st year. It is a queer arts festival that Glitta has performed in since its infancy.
“[I peformed at Feast] when I was doing 'Gurlesque' which was a lezzo strip-club and it was a women’s only strip club; that was the first burlesque club in Australia really so that’s going back to Feast Festival’s early days.”
She was inspired to bring the then dormant art form of burlesque to Australia because of the subversive and satirical origins of the craft. In the modern art scene “everyone and their feather boas” does burlesque, and this abundance of bosoms has not necessarily been a desirable occurrence in her opinion.
“I feel like burlesque now, although I don’t want to discredit it [because] everyone’s entitled to a creative expression – especially women because it’s important that they learn about themselves and their sexuality and power – but I feel that the modern-day burlesque is really whitewashed and kind of, like, photoshopped.”
“When we did 'Gurlesque', it was satire, it was commentary on society, it was all that sort of stuff. I still do that, that’s what my work’s about.”
While Glitta’s work has always been proudly political, the substance of her message has evolved. She explains the thesis advanced in 'Body Map'.
“At this point in my life, all the things I always thought like the patriarchy is evil, I think that is all just a product of consumerism and how consumerism has taken ownership of our bodies.”
“What the body actually is, in its organic nature – we’re born with these bodies and they’re untouched and innocent – and then everything that’s been put on [them] has been society’s conditioning and that continually gets piled on.”
“I’m trying to strip all that back and trying to find the essence – like what makes nudity so dirty and so wrong and it’s not the body, it’s society.”
As a child raised by a nudist mother and a hippy father, Glitta was not programmed to be ashamed of exposed flesh; well not human flesh anyway. She was 'brainwashed' into becoming a vegetarian. While her early work was an angry rebellion against the status quo, she now believes that the humorous sharing of her personal experience is a more persuasive approach.
“Anger can turn to bitterness whereas if you can learn to laugh or just see the absurdity in this whole situation then I think that’s where the power is really, because then you’re not owned by the anger, which is where the system wants us to be so they can divide and conquer us all.”
In the wake of months of persistently vitriolic debate over sexuality, it is apparent that artists like Glitta still have much work to do in breaking down the repression and shame that surrounds humanity’s erotic impulses. Like Marvin Gaye, Glitta is all about the sexual healin’.
“[My show asks] by being able to laugh at ourselves and the restrictions we put on ourselves, can we heal our sexuality?”
