The Bubble Dance

Your familiar with the strip tease, you are probably also familiar with fan dancing. Bubble dancing is somewhat similar to the fan dance. The erotic dancer is sometimes nude, sometimes not and instead of a fan, she (or he) uses a giant bubble or ball to block the audience’s view. The dancer can use the ball during the performance to play ‘peek-a-boo’ with the audience. It is rarely shown as most performers consider the bubble dance to be rather dated. The Bubble Dance has been satirized in various forms. The dancer that created this dance was Sally Rand and a caricature of her appears in a Loony Toons cartoon dancing with the bubble. Of course, in typical cartoon style, Groucho Marx makes an appearance and pops her balloon with a sling shot revealing the surprising barrel she is wearing beneath. The Benny Hill show also pokes fun at the dance in a skit where Hill pops the bubble only to find that the stripper herself is a blow up doll.

The last well known performance of the bubble dance was performed by Julie Atlas Muz at the 2006 Miss Exotic World Pageant. It is interesting to note that the reason that Sally Rand invented the bubble dance is to prevent heavy winds affecting her feathered fans and breaking the illusion of her nudity interrupting the erotic mystique of the dance. The dance went on to earn it's place in classic stripping history thanks to a woman who got frustrated at getting blown. She didn't live without trouble though. It was her erotic dancing that ended up getting her arrested twice in the same trip to San Francisco.

The second time she was arrested she had been given immunity by a San Francisco judge and wore a sign under her dancing outfit announcing her immunity to the arresting officers. It didn't work. Finally, the judge in the case got frustrated by the senseless arrest and actually went to see the show. He would later dismiss all the charges and condemn the arrests as frivolous. Over the rest of her life, Rand worked with strippers and appeared in many feature films.