THEO PANAYIDES meets the doll-like, yet tough and assertive, Chrys Columbine
A white piano, somewhere on YouTube (actually the Very Cherry Burlesque Ballroom in Rotterdam, February 2009). Chrys Columbine sits at the piano. She’s dressed all in black – black skirt, black sleeveless top, black knee-socks and elbow-length gloves. She launches into Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor (she’s a trained concert pianist), then “bits start to come off”, as she likes to describe it. A pause in the music allows her to pull off a glove with her teeth, then flick it into the audience. Another bar is played, and the other glove comes flying off. She plays a few notes one-handed, and tugs at her skirt with the other. By the end – without having missed a beat – she’s half-nude and topless, except for the small plastic hearts covering her nipples.
Five years later, 31-year-old Chrys sits by the pool at the Alasia Hotel in Limassol. “Do you mind if I put up my hair?” she asks. “’Cos I need to do it later for the show” – then proceeds to talk while encasing her blond mane in curlers, hands flicking up with the same multi-tasking adeptness that allowed her to play Chopin and take off her clothes at the same time. She did another show last night (the first of three in Cyprus) though I don’t ask whether she performed ‘Naked Nocturne’, her trademark. That show started at 2 a.m., which may explain her blank look this morning – or maybe the studiously inscrutable expression with which she poses for photos is entirely deliberate: “Conducive to my brand,” as she puts it. Chrys knows what she’s doing.
‘Do people ever misunderstand what you do?’ I ask – a fair question since, after all, what she does involves showing off her body to perfect strangers. Chrys is a burlesque star who’s performed everywhere from Australia to the Cannes Film Festival (“Back from an incredible time in Cannes, amazing performers and new friends (hello Duran Duran),” reads one of her Facebook posts from May 2011), but some might snicker that ‘burlesque’ is nothing more than a fancy name for being a stripper. Maybe so, she admits – at least till those people see her show, and realise there’s a big difference between what she does and what you’d find in any red-light district.
Not that she has anything against strippers. She’s seen some amazing strip shows; “I love watching pole dancing, I think it’s brilliant, it’s like acrobatics” – but “when you go to a strip club it’s very obvious what it is, it’s a kind of distant sexual service, whereas that’s not what burlesque is. Yes, it’s titillating, but it’s not there to turn people on”. In fact, adds Chrys, the audience at her shows often includes more women than men, and the men tend to be a lot quieter. It’s the ladies who dress up, do their hair for the occasion and whoop along with the dancing and shedding of garments. “I’m going to dress like that, and I’m going to be really confident!” she imagines them saying to each other.
Chrys too is confident, though it’s taken her a while to get there. She was born in Camden, a famously funky part of North London, to a vaguely artistic family (her dad is a semi-professional classical guitarist), got into fashion modelling in her mid-teens and ended up hating it. “I did enjoy the work,” she recalls, “I just couldn’t stand the people around me, and being treated like an object”. Brusqueness is perhaps inevitable in that milieu – fashion shows are high-pressure environments; no-one has time to be nice to the models – but it’s more than that. The point of a fashion model is not to distract from the clothes, explains Chrys, so “a girl with a really lovely womanly figure” wouldn’t be appreciated; you’re supposed to be a human coat hanger, “looking like a plank and having clothes pinned on you”.
Soon enough, a different kind of modelling presented itself. Chrys had always been “into the whole Gothic thing”, and that segued into so-called ‘fetish’ modelling – a world of latex, corsets, very pale skin and blank expressions like the one she wears this morning at the Alasia, not to mention excursions into bondage and BDSM. What kind of people does one find in the fetish-Goth world? “Actually, most of them are quite mental,” she replies matter-of-factly.
Was she a bit mental too?
“Yeah, of course I was. I think most performers or artists have to be, a little bit. I mean, it’s got to come from somewhere.”
What kind of girl was she at 20?
“Um, quite crazy,” she replies after a pause. “Quite rock’n roll. Quite a heavy party girl”. She’s always been the same basic person, she adds, but “at 20 I was so much more unsure of myself, and not comfortable in my own skin”.
So I guess she has lots of wild stories from that time?
“I have quite a few,” she says carefully, “I don’t know how much … I mean, I used to go to these parties, these fetish parties, and a lot of them were people dressing up as all kinds of things, whatever their fantasies were – anything from being totally naked, to being a nurse, to a guy who liked you stepping on him in high heels”.
Her own persona (though she was a redhead in those days) was the ‘porcelain doll’ look she still sports today, “quite innocent and doll-like” as she says – which potentially could’ve been dangerous, feeding the fantasies of men who wanted a woman to manipulate and torture. “Some of the situations I got myself in, I look back and think ‘That was really stupid. You could technically have been risking your life there, Chrys’”. The parties themselves were safe enough – but sometimes she’d join in kinky private sessions with people she didn’t know, who could easily have turned out to be “a bunch of sadistic mental cases”. She shakes her head at the memory: “Thank god I’m onstage now, with loads of security around. People can’t touch me.”
It’s a telling remark to make – because there’s undoubtedly a certain distance in Chrys Columbine, even a certain darkness. Her name is a stage name, though Christina (with an ‘i’) is also her real name; and the ‘Columbine’? Two reasons for that, she explains: first, a Columbine is a kind of doll and her persona, as already mentioned, is doll-like – and second, there’s the Columbine high-school massacre in which two American teens killed 12 of their schoolmates. It’s a pretty audacious move to name a burlesque act after dead teenagers, but that’s what Chrys calls the “slightly dark, edgy side to my whole show” – and of course her personal style is also rather edgy, or perhaps “otherworldly”.
Not that she’s cold; she always tries hard to connect with an audience. But “I don’t do bump-and-grind American burlesque,” as she puts it, that whole cartoonish sexual charade we associate with strippers. She’s graceful, remote, like a human artwork or a deconstruction. Indeed, despite getting naked, “I don’t do acts where I’m overtly sexual onstage. I know burlesque performers that do, and they’re brilliant at it, and in real life they’re quite larger-than-life too – but that’s not really me”.
So what is really ‘her’? What’s she like? Tough, for one thing. After all these years, she can look after herself. I mention how proactive she was with our interview, calling and texting several times to arrange the details. “I actually suffer from OCD, so – yeah, I’m stupidly organised,” she replies with a laugh. “When I pack my stuff for shows, every act has its designated bag, [and] my suitcase is sectioned off for different things. People must think ‘Get a life!’, but it works for me”. She’s proactive in other ways too. “I can be pretty vicious if someone deserves it,” notes Chrys quietly. “This happens pretty rarely, you understand, because most people are very respectful and the audience is fantastic – but you get the odd one who decides that, if you walk past, it’s OK for them to touch you inappropriately. I have very quick reflexes with people like that”.
What does she do? Punch them?
“Um, similar, yeah. Or just elbow [them]. Or just tell them exactly what they’re doing, and who they are for doing that.”
That leads to another point. The world (and burlesque itself) has come a long way since the days when acts like hers might’ve been viewed with disapproval by ‘respectable’ people – but Chrys does get negative reactions from feminists sometimes, and they touch a nerve. “Things like lewd comments from burly guys don’t bother me at all,” she says – but when a woman claims that Chrys getting naked onstage is demeaning to women, or encourages the rape of women, “those kinds of things I find infuriating”. She shakes her head: “I don’t understand feminists who try to be as masculine as possible. Surely the whole point of feminism is women’s rights and confidence in being a woman, asserting yourself. And burlesque is about that, feeling good about your femininity and your sexuality”. Besides, what’s all this about ‘encouraging rape’ – as if women were just passive victims waiting to be raped? Women should take care of themselves, “and know what they’re doing, and know what they’re wearing and why. Because they want to!”.
It’s a bit of a Spice Girls moment – but Girl Power doesn’t mean domination over men, let alone man-hating. “I think especially where I’m from, in Britain, men aren’t as chivalrous and old-fashioned as other countries are,” muses Chrys. “I think here in the Mediterranean, men are still quite – well, they do like to take care of the women. In Britain, certainly, a lot of women look after the men. Which I don’t agree with, at all.”
What does she look for in a man?
“I like men to be men. Strong men. I don’t want a beta-male, so to speak. I can’t be doing that. I like a man that takes care of himself, because that shows strength of character and pride in himself, and self-respect. I think people should look after themselves.”
‘People should look after themselves’: that, in a nutshell, might be the Chrys Columbine creed. (This may be a good moment to point out that her favourite film is Scarface, the tale of an all-too-successful entrepreneur.) Behind the porcelain-doll exterior is a canny, resilient woman who’s been looking after herself all her life, and feels no need to apologise for anything – a woman who knows that choosing to take off her clothes is as valid as … well, any other choice a woman makes.
Unsurprisingly, Chrys has plans. Being a burlesque star has an expiry date; “I don’t want to be doing it when I’m 50”. Relocation may be on the cards soon; she’s fed up with the UK, “the weather, and the overcrowding, and the fact that everyone claims they have no money, and the whingeing. They’re always talking about money!”. Life in London is “a ball of stress,” she sighs (being OCD must make it worse); she barely gets time for life outside work. “I love going for long walks,” she says wistfully. “I love swimming. I love working out”. Motorbikes are another great passion: “I’m a bit addicted to speed, I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie. And there’s also something about the freedom. It’s like your soul going out, fast, into the world.”
Like a lot of control freaks (a tag she freely admits to), Chrys seems to love the kind of extreme experience where she’s on the edge yet also in control. Burlesque is one such experience, bikes are another, her dabbling in BDSM back in the day may have been another. Two forces pulling in opposite directions, like Chopin and nudity, or a glimpse of sex and the mention of a high-school massacre, or the stripper who’s alluring yet remote. “I’m definitely quite demure,” notes Chrys Columbine, “but also quite naughty at the same time”. We shake hands, and she goes off to get ready for tonight’s show.
