If you’re looking for a live demonstration of the many ways to take off a pair of gloves, perhaps you should spend a Friday night supping up a burlesque show upstairs at Montrose’s AvantGarden. With local burlesque performer Cara Cherie—a blond-haired vixen with a penchant for rhinestones and dance moves to rival Mata Hari—as your instructor, you’ll soon be slipping your hands out of your dish gloves with such seduction that you’ll have to install thicker curtains on your kitchen windows, lest your neighbors become regulars of your little nightly peep show.

One night in September, Cherie gave a masterclass on the art of the tease as she skulked her way across AvantGarden’s stage in crystal-crusted costumes, entertaining the audience through the well-choreographed removal of many a corset, brassiere, and pair of gloves. In between her sets, longtime Houston burlesque performer and seasoned host Abby Cadabra came out to engage in playful banter with the crowd. At one high point of the evening—there were many—Cadabra, also a singer, broke into a sultry rendition of “Call Me” by Blondie, a fitting tune for the night considering it was originally composed for the 1980 neo-noir classic American Gigolo. The crowd ate it up.

By the end of the hour-long show, Cadabra and Cherie had the entire room so thoroughly wrapped around their fingers that they could’ve had everyone rhinestoning brassieres for them backstage for free after the show. Although the evening’s performances all seemed effortless, a lot of technique goes into teasing, as Cherie is quick to point out. “I need you in the palm of my hand. I need to make eye contact with you, and I need you to know that I own this venue right now for the next three to four minutes,” says Cherie of how she hypnotizes her audience.

Her siren skills are used to some degree by all burlesque artists. Unlike in traditional dance or theater, performers are known to interact with the audience during their sets, whether through making intense eye contact, engaging in teasing banter, or artfully discarding pieces of their costumes into the crowd. This performed intimacy results in the audience going into a sort of trance, their attention fully focused on every movement of the artist, no matter how small.

Although high-caliber burlesque is everywhere in Houston these days, during the early part of the pandemic there was some concern that the art form was at risk of disappearing locally. Pre-COVID, Prohibition Theatre, a now-defunct downtown venue, was the epicenter of burlesque in Houston and the home of the Moonlight Dolls, a burlesque troupe formed in 2012 that served as the training ground for many of the city’s current leading ladies—artists like Cadabra, Cherie, and Valentina J’Adore all earned their pasties there. When the pandemic hit, the Moonlight Dolls were on a break while the troupe prepared to move its shows to a new venue. Unfortunately, that break became permanent when COVID shutdowns led to the group permanently disbanding.

“I went from having 10 to 15 shows a week to having one,” remembers Cadabra, who started performing with the group as a chorus girl, then became a soloist and later a host. “I thought, ‘What can I do to make this my job again? How can I make a living doing this?’”

While many burlesque performers went fully digital during the early pandemic days by offering donation-based live stream performances and classes, Cadabra knew she wanted to get back onstage as soon as possible. By June 2020, she had launched a weekly show at AvantGarden, “The Short and Sweet Speakeasy,” on the bar’s outside patio. She eventually brought in Cherie, who had previously been a Moonlight Dolls chorus girl, as one of her regular featured performers. More than three years later, the show is still going strong, and Cadabra has her own production company that regularly puts on shows at other venues across the city.

Valentina J’Adore is Cadabra’s “burlesque daughter”—in burlesque, as in its cousin art form of drag, it’s common for more experienced performers to take new ones under their wing. J’Adore also has her own production company now, and several other burlesque performers in the city are doing similar producing work. She says that in some ways, the downfall of Prohibition (the Prohibition Theatre, that is) was what led to the growth of Houston’s burlesque scene. If you were a contracted dancer at Prohibition, you couldn’t do other shows around town, and you most certainly weren’t allowed to produce your own.

“It kept a good group of Houston performers kind of locked into that one location and that one show,” J’Adore says. “Now that it’s not there and we all have the freedom to do whatever we like, we’re producing so many more shows that have a lot more variety and diversity. I think there’s just a lot more opportunities around town now.” 

Although the Moonlight Dolls are no longer an entity, many of the troupe’s former members still regularly share a stage. Cherie is a core company member at Cadabra’s AvantGarden show, and those two and J’Adore all perform together at venues like the Blind Finch Speakeasy, a Prohibition era–style cocktail bar in Spring. The trio also spends two months every year performing in Tease of the Seas, a pirate-themed burlesque and variety show that has a residency at the Texas Renaissance Festival’s Thirsty Pirate Pub. With four performances a day, the more family-friendly show—if your family is okay with a PG-13 rating—is a major undertaking that showcases the diverse skills of all three of the performers.

Like many burlesque artists, Cadabra, Cherie, and J’Adore all have backgrounds in adjacent art forms that have provided them with key skills they rely on while performing. Cadabra took gymnastics and dance classes growing up and went to college for theater before becoming a professional cheerleader and eventually finding her way into burlesque. J’Adore, who also works as a costumer for Stages, went to school for musical theater. While making her rounds auditioning for shows, she decided one day to try out for the Moonlight Dolls and hasn’t stopped since. Cherie, who was an officer for her high school dance team, spent a few years working at a gentlemen’s club before tiring of how focused on the male gaze that profession was and deciding to try her luck with burlesque.

While they each came to burlesque for various reasons, they all have similar views on its ability to empower women. “Burlesque is a way for me to regain my body and my beauty and to just project what I want to see in the world, which is feminism and women unapologetically owning their bodies and just being sexy,” Cherie says. “It’s all for the female gaze. I do what I do to empower women and myself and to respect the art of the tease. There are all these tools that have been given to us by prior performers and burlesque legends, and I want to do them justice and not do this for the male gaze.”

While there were, as expected, quite a few hetero men in the audience of Cherie and Cadabra’s AvantGarden performance this past September, an equal number of women and queer people occupied the space—and they were often the loudest voices in the room as they cheered and encouraged the dancers. Burlesque, at least in Houston, is for everyone. And although we might not have the large stage shows of other places, Cadabra says our uberdiverse and culturally rich city makes the local scene unique.

“Houston has some of the best burlesque in general, and I’m not just saying that because I live here. I’ve traveled the world and have performed everywhere from Hollywood to Australia and have seen some amazing talent, and Houston has some of the best,” Cadabra says. “You can go to Vegas, and you can spend money on a plane ticket and you can go see an amazing show, but you can see something of that caliber right here in your own backyard. It’s just incredible that people sleep on Houston because it’s Houston. They just don’t know what they’ve got.”