BmoreArt

Jacqueline Boxx has always loved performing. She’s done musical theater, cabaret, ballet, tap (among other dance forms), and began burlesque in 2005 when she was in college. Then she was hit by a car. It revealed she had Ehlers Danlos Syndrome—a condition that initially aided her with incredible flexibility but also resulted in dislocations, easily bruising skin, chronic pain, and fatigue. 

“I wasn’t feeling connected to my body. Burlesque seemed like a way to reconnect and to heal that relationship between me and my physical body and take ownership of it again,” Boxx says. 

She remembered feeling terrified to bring her wheelchair on stage for her first showcase after the accident. She thought, “nobody wants to see someone in a wheelchair strip. But I ended up being wrong. It started this journey that both healed my relationship with my body and my relationship with disability,” she says. 

Boxx had taken a class called Burlesque for the Soul and wanted to bring something similar to Baltimore. Her vision went beyond a usual technical class that instructed students on how to move their body, how to do their makeup or their costuming—it was so much more. 

Essential Tease’s curriculum: embrace yourself and connect to your body. 

“We’re teaching from the inside out by really getting down deep into the issues that are keeping [students] from who they really want to be and translating that to the stage but also translating it to daily life,” Rockafella says. The workshop is intentional in creating an inclusive and brave space for expression with BIPOC discounts, queer representation, and guest teachers who can diversify the instruction. Essential Tease also offers two scholarships for students. 

“This current political climate is trying to stifle voices, take away joy and make people homogenous and you know it’s really fascist,” Ruby Rockafella says. “How do you rebel against fascism? You keep putting joy on stage.” 

In workshop, the instructors ask each student to discuss a high and low of their week. From there, Tempete La Coeur leads the class through a guided meditation. 

Her soft and musical voice sinks into the subconscious as students lay on their backs and close their eyes. She asks them to envision their future self—their burlesque self—greeting them. What did they look like? What were they wearing? What words could describe this new version?

After the meditation, the students wrote their words along the wall of mirrors. Radiant. Comical. Ethereal. Unshakable. Shameless. Confident. 

Like Boxx, Rockafella knows from experience that burlesque is transformative. It is an act that can bring one through a journey of acceptance and self-love. “In every cohort, we are learning alongside them and we are finding things in ourselves every single time that we teach,” she says. 

Rockafella’s relationship to her own body began to change starting in 2017 after going through one, then later two C-section deliveries. She stopped performing and decided to host shows instead but then the pandemic had hit and she quit burlesque altogether. At one point, she threw all her costumes away. 

“Everything changed for me once I became a parent.” She felt that her body wasn’t working the way it used to and she didn’t have a place in burlesque. 

Even so, her community kept in contact. When she decided to return to the stage, she performed a number about motherhood and isolation. “And in that performance, I really had to come to terms with the changes that my body went through,” she says. “I learned to love the vessel that carried my children, kept them alive and kept them safe. I learned to love that vessel that kept me alive and kept me safe.”
Her performance caused other parents to come up to her after the show

When La Coeur first began performing burlesque, it was partly because she felt there was a gap in her creative expression as a young wife with young children at the time. “The idea of being able to create a performance from top to bottom and have this wonderful community who was willing to give me feedback and advice on how to make it happen was revolutionary and very transformative for me,” she says.  

The state of the country has angered La Coeur. At times she has felt powerless and invisible, but her work through Essential Tease provides opportunities to push back and to build community. “It helps to connect with other people who are feeling similar things, and who are going through their own journeys,” she says. “We can create a safe space.” 

Boxx notes that at the start of each class, students are able to show up as a new person with new pronouns or names and that can change from day to day. Essential Tease ensures that students are affirmed in their identities. “Even if outside of these doors you may not feel seen as the way you truly are, we make sure that we always welcome you—however you are and whoever you are,” Boxx says. 

After eight weeks in the studio, the group will have the opportunity to perform on the stage of the Creative Alliance’s black box theater before a live audience. This spring’s cohort showcase is June 20th, 2025. 

In the intimacy of this first class though, they have just begun the revolution of discovery with a willingness to explore more and more.

Rockafella asks each student to select an adjective written on the mirrors. Someone calls out, “Confident!” Soon enough the loud horns and heavy bass of “Confident” by Demi Lovato play and the instructors invite the students to walk, to strut, to dance across the room using some of the burlesque moves they learned that day. 

Awkward chuckles subside as students look at their reflections in the mirrors on the studio walls and transform into those thirteen burlesque dancers they envisioned during the meditation practice. 

Then they move. 

You can celebrate the spring cohort at Essential Tease’s Burlesque Student showcase (featuring guest MC, Sitara Sin) June 20th, 2025 at 8pm in the Creative Alliance theater.