Frontal Nerdity

Penny Starr Jr. is combining her love for sci-fi with her genetic predisposition for burlesque to create her own brand of performance art, reports David Moye on AOL News (7/30/10). Penny grew up watching sci-fi films with her parents, and her grandmother, Penny Starr Sr., who was a burlesque star in the ’50s and ’60s. For a while, Penny Jr. was into "feminist performance" art but she got the idea to follow in her grandma’s dancesteps after making "a documentary on the Velvet Hammer, a modern-day burlesque troupe."

"I think of myself as a nerd first," says Penny,"then a filmmaker; and finally, a dancer. All of these things fuel each other." She observes that burlesque archetypes aren’t all that different from, say, Princess Leia (video). "After all," she says. "Star Trek and Star Wars are just modern-day equivalents of the myths of the Norse Gods." Penny likes to think of what she’s doing as a sophisticated art form, but admits that her audience might not.

"The audience doesn’t care about the art," she says. "They just want to see their favorite sci-fi pin-ups take their clothes off." Nor does she see it as a big moneymaker, necessarily, but she does see it as a way to remind people "of what burlesque originally was," before the comics and the dancers parted ways. "No one’s making enough money here that we have to appeal to the lowest common denominator," says Penny, adding: "That said, Star Trek is pretty popular." In addition to live performances, Penny is also about to release a DVD, "Supernova A Go-Go Sci-Fi Burlesque Show."