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This is Part Two of Scene Diva (Read Part One interview...)
Graphics and layout by Jeff Teachworth
Dita von Teese. Just the name can stop traffic.
She’s the Ideal of Beauty incorporated in the Flesh. Glamour Incarnate.
Though diminutive in person, onstage she towers. Quiet and studious, offstage she prefers to disappear and observe. Onstage, she commands the gaze and all that follows. She’s the star. The real deal. The Superstar reigning Queen of Burlesque. She’s Forties Glamour reborn. Dita embodies the Pinup Girl ideal and brings her to life before your very eyes.
Every stripper disrobes, but Queen Dita sheds - that which encumbers and limits her. She can make taking off her gloves the sexiest thing in the world. She’s the culmination, the apogee of every adolescent fantasy I ever had, and gives me a whole new dimension to dream about. She can make what would normally be an awkward, ridiculous posture and infuse it with natural grace and the illusion that it’s the most natural thing in the world. The art that conceals art, the ability to do the extremely difficult and make it look easy. Dita’s all that and more.
 The ultimate sexy feast is not necessarily her aim, she just achieves it as a by-product along the way. She exudes higher goals of art and elegance. The “sexy” part just can’t help itself. Some burlesque artists, particularly novices, stop at achieving sexy. Dita begins a little past it and moves way beyond it. When she flourishes and flirts, she transmutes the merely carnal into the sublime, beyond sexuality into an Olympian bliss of pleasure. She’s Aphrodite in the flesh, carnality transcended into glamour, style, and class.
Hamish Bowles, the European Editor of Vogue, says of Dita: “She has a very specific aesthetic informed by Varga’s Girls and Betty Paige … but its very unraunchy is kind of refine”. She moves from pose to pose with a grace and naturalness that belie the degree of difficulty and training it takes to make it look easy.
Leaning into a backbend on the edge of a giant champagne glass, perfect body and back arched, breasts pointed up toward heaven, Miss Von Teese makes it all seem perfectly natural and ordinary in an incredibly voluptuous kind of way.
Who else can prance around en pointe like she can? Dita Von Teese began ballet at the age of four, and now she can strut “on point” like she had invisible high heels on. She combines the ordinary physics of disrobing and the universal vocabulary of striptease. From pole dancer to classic burlesque queen, Dita transforms those motions into the languid longing of desire, in a language dipped in liquid luxury. It’s her movement and confident style that lift the potentially ordinary striptease into a sublime vortex of exquisite and ecstatic glamour.
 Her ultimate slide into the giant champagne glass is confident, flawless, and swift. She spins and preens, her voluptuous form glistening with moisture while her perfect black hair remains high and dry. Behind every Dita move is the ultimate ecdysiast narrative. Her every shrug and shimmy, her every stretch and squeeze purrs. Each layer of clothing vanishes as an afterthought, revealing her creamy flesh, celebrating its liberation. She manages to communicate the illusion of desire, every pause and wiggle expressing a separate moment, a special and personal, “just for you, darling.”
It’s never been done any better. This writer’s been around long enough to know what once was and what is now. You’ll have to take my word for it, but Dita Von Teese is the shining exemplar of Burlesque at its finest. At this level, the only differences from the superstars of yesteryear are individual style and timing. That we can enjoy her art at its pinnacle is her blessing. Thank you, Dita, from all of us. What you do is beyond words.
If only Varga had lived to paint you.
 
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