Popular travelling Burlesque show, The Jitterbug Club, has reached the end of a five-year run celebrating all things Vaudeville.
Popular travelling Burlesque show, The Jitterbug Club, has reached the end of a five-year run celebrating all things Vaudeville. The show’s originators, an eight-piece rag-tag band called The Snakeoil Merchants, in a further blow to local cabaret fans, will in turn wind down with one last explosive Melbourne show this week. Speaking to Beat today is singer and master-mind behind the double-act, Mojo Juju, a kind of conduit between titillating 1930s escapist shows and modern performance art. Along side tales of drunken home-done tattoos and causing audiences to blush, she enlightens this novice on the finer points of what it means to be a cabaret star in today’s world.
“There are a lot of performers out there who believe in what they do, and I think when you convey that, your audience can’t help but be disarmed,” Mojo begins. “If you go out on stage and don’t believe in what you’re doing though, I think people can tell and they won’t go along for the ride with you.” It’s this very approach to her act that has kept audiences coming back to The Jitterbug Club’s shows. Juju believes not in quaint, cheap-shock stage shows, but in bringing a sense of fun and danger back to the fore. “For me the aesthetic of what we do is nostalgic but it’s about the transference of the impact cabaret or vaudeville had in the 1930s and ‘40s to now. I understand that it is not exactly relevant to today, but what you wanna do is make it contemporary being a little confronting which actually still is an anomaly in live shows,” she says. “You know, it’s not just pretty dancing girls, it has a sense of humour, and it has a shock element…
Basically I want my audience to blush when they come to one of our shows,” Juju laughs. I wonder: does Mojo believe people perhaps like to be confronted, and if that’s what keeps these kinds of shows from fading out? “What keeps the art form alive is understanding the impact it had in its day, and adding to that what is maybe provocative and taboo today. The differences really aren’t that great I don’t think,” she says.
It seems earnest performers have always muscled into the front of the cue, while provocateurs frolicked down the back. It’s a sign of music’s bizarre conservative undercurrent – a forever clinging barnacle it picked up once it realised it also had a political voice in decades gone by. Mojo believes that now is as good a time as any to celebrate the subversive when you take in to account the fact that Vaudeville began in far less conservative times than ours. “We’re living in very self-aware times I think.
People seem very concerned with how you are supposed to behave in certain situations or out at a concert, and that leaves me feeling just stifled. Vaudeville throws all of that out the window and gives free expression room to breathe. I honestly think people are longing for that, though they don’t always know, but you see a kind of relief in audience’s faces at these shows.” Mojo’s view on Burlesque’s shift into the mainstream – via a certain recent film starring Cher – but mostly through acts like The Dresden Dolls is mostly positive.
“I haven’t seen that film (Burlesque) yet, I’m a bit scared to be honest!” She laughs. “But I think people like Amanda Palmer, Mikelangelo (from Tin Star) and Mick Conway – who’s one of the last true old-school Vaudeville performers still out there – are incredible. They’re authentic, you know – they don’t use Vaudeville as a gimmick. I think their work only strengthens our little branch of the showbiz tree.” As a singer/songwriter and conceptual artist, Mojo by more happy accident than design, found herself gravitating to the underground cabaret scene in Australia. Once she realised her vivid ideas of stage shows were in fact a shared passion, exciting things began to happen.
Mojo is in her own words, ‘bursting with new ideas for a show’. The end of a successful run like the 1930s New York-themed Jitterbug Club, is a bittersweet affair, Mojo admits, but as the prime designer she is obviously keen to make some new wow. “Ending these shows is just so sad in a way because of the relationships I’ve built up with the other performers, but at the same time, I’m so excited about the possibilities of doing something new.
See THE JITTERBUG CLUB, starring Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants’, last Melbourne show ever at Red Bennies this Saturday April 2.
