Sometimes you walk around Bushwick and you know where you are going.

Sometimes you don’t know where you want to end up. The majority of the times, you know where you are going, but you don’t know what is about to come. This past Tuesday, I found my way to the Morgan Bar where Scary Ben and Darlinda Just Darlinda invited me to the world of Bushwick Burlesque.

Burlesque retains a special relationship with its audience. An audience that every night enters in this mystagogy of eroticism with nude goddesses and bacchian satyrs. They scandalize us and taunt us to be one with them in the celebration of the body. And as the performance grows throughout time, the audience grows along with it. Last Tuesday I met people who had been attending the Bushwick Burlesque performances consistently for a year, when the troupe was in its nascent stages, as well as newbies who said it was their first time. One long-time audience member told me that this performance evolved from hosting just a group of friends, to attracting a much larger and more diverse audience.