Forgive us for being so blunt but what is the point? “Naked Girls Reading is beauty and brains,” replies Valentine. “It’s entertaining, it’s fun, and it celebrates intelligent women. And it can be very sexy.” What about charges of objectifying the female body (yawn) yet again? Isn’t it time to get away from naked women altogether? “It’s giving the objects a voice,” Valentine answers.
How did Valentine and co-producer Vesper White come to be involved? “I’d been following the concept for some time,” she says. “The idea of the show caught my attention; I was intrigued, so I got in touch with the people in the States and offered to produce the show in Melbourne. The Naughty Bits is the launch of the show in Melbourne. We did 24 shows in Adelaide; it was a roller coaster doing the whole season in The Garden of Unearthly Delights. We had a variety of different authors. We had readings from Bukowski to Baudelaire to Thomas the Tank Engine. We had a variety of women; Fiona Patten from The Sex Party performed. We got good reviews.”
Naked Girls Reading was born in the USA. Two burlesque performers in Chicago, Michele L’amour and Franky Vivid, came up with the idea to combine literary pursuits with nudity and once they’d opened their venue Studio L’amour they presented their first Naked Girls Reading event and found interest spread like the proverbial wildfire around the United States, and they were inundated with requests coming from women wanting to host their own shows. By the end of 2012, Naked Girls Reading shows were being performed in 18 different countries and the number of shows keeps rising.
Where do Valentine and White expect to go from the Smith St launch? Does she have plans to have nuded-up readings all around the country? “We would like to do it alongside a writer’s festival. We’d like to open show up to different audience demographic. Not readers; the audience. We did get the token sniggers from a few 19-year-old boys at Adelaide who’d come for the naked bit, but we also got a lot of book enthusiasts. We got different kinds of people. I would love to do a show like that for the older couples demographic. It’s literary, intelligent; it ticks all the boxes. We want to involve local bookshops in cross promotion, involve local writers. We want to run it as a bi-monthly or monthly night in Melbourne. We’ve started talking to a few different festivals.” How do they find the readers? “Someone will pop into mind. In Adelaide we had performers from all the other shows doing readings. Myself and Vesper are at every show. That’s it – very simple. I promise you it will be entertaining, relaxing fun.”
Valentine’s interest in fashion lead to her getting involved in burlesque after she’d started making costumes. “Doing costumes is so much more fun than fashion,” she says. “My worlds are tying together. I am primarily a costume maker and burlesque performer. The Naughty Bits is one of many projects on the run.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
