Stanislavskian Striptease Speculations

I often happen during the years to give acting classes around Europe. And I am bored by the intellectual attitude of the students. If I was the director of a theatre academy, I would put strip-tease as a fundamental teaching.
I find that his unique ability to reveal while hiding, or to hide while revealing, opening the door to emotional life and deepest imagination; and the full involvement of the acting persona, the implicit self-hyrony required with the subsequent necessary and enjoyable lignteness, his immediacy…

All this can be the best key to act everything, from Shakespeare to stand-up comedy, in a celebration of the anti-psycology.

Unfortunately, time is gone when stripping was a pure form of theatre, maybe more clandestine than legitimate, and audience was stimulated to pay his modest ticket to the fairground girl-show booths, finding their places between monkey races, wax displays or carnival rides.

My educational theatrical chimera will perhaps never see the light, and the more cerebral masturbatory “method” acting will maybe stay still the standard, and theatre will keep being mostly boring.

But the girl above, in the picture hiding her dramatic treasure with a thespyan icon, does something to enforce my idea. She calls herself Ursula Martinez, and performs a beautiful act, combining the apparitions of strip-tease with the disappearings of magic (or vice-versa, if you like).

See her at work:

http://www.rivelazioni.com/mm/230_ursula_martinez.shtml