What is a Burlesque Dancer?

I’d been asked for my bio from three separate sources in the last few weeks and I felt it needed abit of an overhaul. Its been the same one since I started, I just kept adding on the Wow stuff as it happened! For research purposes, I decided to read through some other performer bios to see what I liked and didn’t like. I’ve since decided I’ll be writing a How To for Bios after all this but there were a few things that I noticed:

1. If you are Blonde, you are a Bombshell.

2. If you are Classic, you’re also Modern

3. There was alot of gracing the stage..

4. The greats don’t use alot of adjectives because they just list every impressive thing they’ve ever done (which is obviously alot) or let quotes from other sources do the describing.

A side note but my two favorites were Amber Rays‘ (performing at Toronto Fest) and Madame Mae I (from VIBF). Amber’s adjectives were great!! I liked how she still had a sense of showmanship mixed in with her accomplisments!! Mae’s was short but concise but I thought it made her sound really fun and exciting- very well written!!

Now while all this research was happening- I had inspiration for a mad experiment! What if I took all the adjectives and awesome nouns from a group of performer bios and put them into a word cloud!? A word cloud happens when you provide a bunch of text for the generator (I used Wordle), which will create clusters that display the words that appear most often in greater prominence. This information could be used for a variety of purposes! Maybe it will unlock the secrets of how to become one of the top 10 performers in the world!! Maybe it will show what words are super overused and should be avoided! Or maybe it will be a beautiful description of what is a Burlesque dancer from Burlesque dancers themselves. Check out my findings below:

Bios from Vancouver Burlesque Festival

From the Toronto Festival: