PMA Professor Austin Bunn will screen his new short documentary about an upstate burlesque academy, Getting Almost Naked, at Liquid State Brewing on January 29, from 7:30 pm to 8:30 pm. The screening will be followed by a post-show discussion with the film's subjects and stars. The film is produced and edited by Austin Bunn, with cinematography by Karen Rodriguez and Fabio Morelli and created in collaboration with the students of Cornell's Spring 2025 Rural Humanities Seminar, "Documenting Local Lives".
Getting Almost Naked (23 mins) focuses on the Bees Knees Burlesque Academy in Cortland NY, where five adults -- a punk rock hairdresser, a custodian, a queer composer, a Southern Baptist-bred college administrator, and a mother of four -- sign up for a 10-week "burlesque bootcamp" that culminates in a nerve-wracking public performance.
“I heard about the Bees Knees Academy from a former student in the Rural Humanities Seminar,” said Bunn. “She had participated in the first "Pop A Pastie" burlesque 101 course and suggested that it might make a promising subject for a documentary. As soon as I met the owner and main teacher Tessa Myers, I knew she was right. Tessa is from Ithaca and graduated with a dance degree from Hobart and Wiliam Smith College before heading out to San Francisco to work in a peep show. She is an uncommonly open and permission-giving person; she teaches so much more than burlesque, dance, and pole technique — she shows students how to be seen. And the five students in the course really captured a wonderful range of personalities and reasons for taking the course.
“So last spring, the 10 students from the seminar attended the Sunday Pop a Pastie classes on Sunday afternoons and filmed everything. I brought on two professional cinematographers, Karen Rodriguez and Fabio Morelli, to help train the students and run one camera as well. The burlesque class culminated with a public performance in May, which was both stressful and exhilarating for the five new performers. Students in the seminar edited together "selects" of all the footage and then, during the summer, I cut together the finished film.
“I had gone into this project thinking that burlesque meant one thing: risqué performance designed for straight male audiences, the "art of the tease" so to speak. But burlesque has evolved considerably, with pole dance class as exercise and "queer burlesque" inverting all expectations. Pop a Pastie is a step-by-step course in slowing down, being seen, and not just relishing the gaze but controlling it. I think if the class taught me anything it's that being vulnerable can be beautiful, especially to a beat.”
Read more about the screening of Getting Almost Naked
Read more about Bees Knees Burlesque and Pole Academy
