Meet Luna Rosa Burlesque Dancer

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Luna Rosa will be making two very special performances on 30th November. The first will be burlesque dancing and the second performing a monologue created especially for her. Burlexe caught up with her to talk all things burlesque and Burlexe.

Luna Rosa Interview

Introduce yourself and your special magic: My name is Exotic Luna Rosa. I’m a burlesque performer and I am known for my style of classic exotica, hence the name.

I take a lot of my influences from old Egyptian cinema from the 1940s and 1950s and the same for Cuban, Creole influences. Anything that sparks the imagination of what far away lands might look like. There’s a lot of storytelling with elements of folklore and fairytales and Arabian nights and Santeria.

Which performance are you most proud of? I love every one of my routines. It’s really hard to choose because I feel every performance brings out a different side of me, that makes me a complete person.

But I think of all my routines the one that really consumes me at the core is Dragon of the Nubian Valley because, again, it encompasses the idea of exotica and imagination. The music I use is totally me, it’s a piece by Charles Mingus called ‘Solo Dancer’. Although it’s a free jazz piece and is a difficult one for some audiences, as some people have to acquire the taste of jazz, in a way I quite like it.

I don’t want something that’s straightforward. I don’t want something to be obvious. It’s very much a tale of passion and fire and fury and possessiveness and anger and at the same time calm and beautiful and glamorous.

Who’s your burlesque icon? I have so many. From the present time, I love Dirty Martini and I love how she performs. She’s gorgeous and she emits so much magnetism when she performs that you can’t help but look at her.

From the original burlesque performers, I would actually say Dixie Evans, definitely. But really my main influences and my main inspirations are Samia Gamal. She was a belly dancer, in cabaret scenes of the old movies from Egypt and a dancer called Ninón Sevilla from Cuba who was a dancer that was used a lot in Mexican cinema.

What does burlesque mean to you? I don’t think burlesque can be categorised or pigeonholed and it shouldn’t be. Anyone who tries to do that has completely missed the point and they’re doing it for their own need to put everything into a box.

Burlesque is really stories of the imagination and for me, it’s using my own strengths and weaknesses and developing them and creating a story out of them. Like I described with my Dragon of the Nubian Valley, the possessiveness and anger is in me and I dramatise it and multiply it into my routine.

Burlesque can be striptease, it can be not-striptease; it can be comedy, it can be sexy. For me, I use it because I love femininity and that is my way of being the ultimate woman, in my eyes. For somebody else, burlesque would be an embodiment of comedy, in a different way and there’s so much variety that you can never get bored of it.

What’s your burlesque ambition? I have a few ambitions. I have a very big ambition to create my own show, something that is very different from what’s out there at the moment. Again honing in on exotica and where it comes from. So exotica is an idea, it’s a genre but the genre came from something and that something is folklore and I really want to use that in a show.

I’ve been working with some dancers from Martinique. I love live music and I dance with a rhythm and blues band but I really like the idea of having live dramas and creating a show that you would have seen in the movies back then. And I’m also hoping, hoping to apply for Miss Exotic World for next year. So if I can get myself ready and everything into gear, I want to get accepted and be there.

Tell us about your involvement in Burlexe: I’m very excited about this show because I think it’s something very different from what’s out there, it’s so refreshing. What I like about this show is you have your performances but there are links with the stories through the monologues.

My role in it is as a performer but I’ve also been given the opportunity to perform a monologue in it as well, which I love because that has brought out another side of me that I really enjoyed. The monologue is very reflective of myself, I think, even though I didn’t write it. So being a part of this show is really healthy for me as a performer because it’s doing something very positive in the world of burlesque.

See the Burlesque Monologue that Luna Rosa performs and see our answer to: what is burlesque?

(Image from Rosario Lopez)

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