It's almost midnight in Dalston, an up and coming area of east London, and we're heading to 'Die Freche Muse', a party for which the location has been kept top-secret until the last minute. A young female clown greets us with a wink and a flower as we duck under the arches of a slightly run down Victorian building. Stepping into the main lounge, an intimate space with no more than a hundred guests, it feels as though we've pulled back a velvet curtain to reveal a scene of swinging skirt hems and puffs of wizard smoke from suited, shiny-shoed characters. The smell of old-school cigarettes and the sound of softening Dixieland Jazz fills the air. Pre-war, post-war and even Mardi Gras seem to colour the cool-cat characters in dress and attire. A young woman moves to the front of the crowd, dedicates her next performance to 'Baron Von Sanderson', the organiser of the party with the fun and fanciful 'character' name, and softly croons her version of a Billy Holiday number. Another woman sashays her way towards the singer, seemingly a close friend of both her and the piano player but not necessarily a choreographed part of the act, and begins a sensual striptease. So commences an evening's entertainment of romantic, softly sensuous and sometimes rather amusing Burlesque shows. On another evening, as dusk settles , two busloads of guests arrive at a William and Mary style mansion house set on a huge estate in the Buckinghamshire countryside, 30 minutes outside of London. Built in 1690, it is now called The Stoke Place Hotel and this evening it is the setting for the infamous White Blackbird club night. It's another alternative period event, this time a cross between a slumber party and a decadent country house soiree. Within its walls, behind hidden doors, lies a panoply of diversions, a plethora of delights. Performances, play acting, a 1950s cocktail lounge, lessons in the fox-trot and the cha-cha-cha. We wander around like the guests looking for distractions, watching black and white films exploring another world. Lost in this intimate world of nostalgia and decadence, this is London in all it's Neo-Burlesque glory.
