Within Vancouver’s do-it-yourself movement, the coming together of craft beer and burlesque is surely kismet.
As people who translate their identities into art for a living, Vancouver’s brewers and dancers quite naturally join forces each year to celebrate with Beerlesque – an annual fundraising romp for the Roundhouse Community Centre.
Presented by Vancouver Craft Beer Week, more than 20 breweries (Parallel 49, Bomber, Driftwood, Russell, Fernie, Deep Cove, R&B Brewing, Spinnakers, Steamworks, Moon Under Water) will serve up their finest wheats, ambers, and IPAs at the Roundhouse Oct. 10, while food carts fill plates and dancers fill thoughts.
When the Westender caught up with headliner Melody Mangler, co-founder of the Screaming Chicken Theatrical Society and Vancouver’s longest-running burlesque show, the veteran performer was busy sewing costumes for her latest crop of students.
“It comes with the class that I teach,” she explains. “Everybody gets a costume handcrafted by me.”
Mangler might shrug off the labour of love as no big deal, but a costume is to a burlesque dancer what a cover is to a novel: It’s the first thing that catches your eye, and the last thing that matters when you get to the end. But in between, it has to do its job.
“I really feel like, when she’s doing a solo act, a burlesque dancer’s dance partner on stage is her costume,” Mangler says. “So I like to approach burlesque that way.”
For Beerlesque (which will also feature dancers like Nicky Ninedoors and Lola Frost), Mangler says she has an idea of what road she is going to sashay down, and it happens to be a garden path.
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to be doing my signature rose act,” she hints, “which includes quite a few transformations and unexpected surprises. I can’t give too much away, but it is a lot to do with the costume piece,” she adds.
But Mangler wasn’t born with the gift of the stitch and the snap tape; she actually learned how to sew from her husband and business partner Norm Elmore, who picked up his skills as the son of a Home Ec. teacher.
A giant laugh escapes her fiery, tattooed frame as Mangler recalls when she and Elmore were running their now-defunct R-rated game show at the Cobalt, and she was its punk-rock Vanna White.
“My costumer was a burlesque dancer,” Mangler explains, “and she kept trying to push my costumes more scanty, a little bit at a time.”
That was all it took. The trained actress began researching burlesque, and fell in love with the art form. She started working it into the game show, and eventually the burlesque took over.
Since then, Mangler has established herself as one of Canada’s greatest burlesque beauties. Her first time performing outside of the country in 2009, she took home Best Début at the Burlesque Hall of Fame – the first Canadian ever to do so. And over the past 11 years, her not-for-profit society has produced more than 200 shows and helped create the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival.
“I fell more in love with [burlesque] than going to auditions and trying to be something else for other people,” Mangler says. “It really is the DIY nature of the art form that inspires me the most.”
