When it comes to the history of the striptease, Chicago has more to show for itself than any other city in America. Rachel Shteir, the head of dramaturgy at DePaul’s Theatre School, dates the American striptease back to 1893 when the famed World’s Columbian exhibitionist, “Little Egypt,” originated the Hootchy Cootch. Little Egypt, who wowed millions of fairgoers on the Midway, was arguably the first mass-entertainment erotic star. Clad in vaguely Middle Eastern harem garb, the performer, Shteir says, was the first to import another loose arabesque: “belly dancing,” borrowed in fact from Paris, where orientalism was all the rage. One distinctly American addition was the tune, still sung on playgrounds, about a place in France where the naked ladies dance. The tune came out of a cocktail-party improvisation by Sol Bloom, the impresario who imported the exotic entertainment. Watch any cartoon with a reference to belly dancers or snake charmers, and you hear the very music Little Egypt danced to.
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Oddly enough, Little Egypt, the performer, remains a mystery. No doubt fairgoers went to see the dancer. One contemporary news account described the Hootchy Cootcher thus: “When she dances every fiber and every tissue in her entire anatomy shakes like a jar of jelly from your grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner. Now gentlemen, I don’t say that she’s that hot. But I do say that she is as hot as the Fourth of July in the hottest county in the state.” A 1951 movie, Little Egypt, directed by Northwestern grad Frederick De Cordova (later the director of The Tonight Show), purportedly chronicled the dancer’s life. “Who Little Egypt was is one of the more controversial topics among historians of the striptease,” Shteir says. “Some think she was English, some think she was in fact a lot of different dancers, some think she was a man.”
Shteir’s familiarity with the exotic past along the Midway is not altogether new. The New York native holds a BA in Near Eastern studies from the University of Chicago, where she made big Egypt her object of study. Shteir pursued theater on the side, working at the Court Theatre on productions of Greek tragedies under the aegis of translator David Grene and director Nicholas Rudall. She also took a two-year hiatus from the U. of C. to study in Tunisia, and following graduation she spent four months in Cairo. Her intention had been to continue in Near Eastern studies, though even while abroad she gravitated toward thetheater. On her return, she decided to enter the Yale School of Drama’sgraduate program in dramaturgy,employing the techniques of literary textual analysis to works for the stage. “I was always interested in popular, not just dramatic, theater,” she says. “I was especially drawn to the question of how people transformed themselves through theater. Burlesque was the lowest rung on the entertainmenthierarchyfull of jokes and girlsbut it was also a means to create a new persona for the performers.”
Chicago’s openness also created an atmosphere where strippers could move upscale. Sally Rand, a failed film actress, enthralled crowds at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in the early 30s. She danced nude behind a fan of swan feathers manipulated ever soartfully to the strains of classical music.
