âThatâs all you have on at the end of the day, the music and your shoes.â Thatâs how Viva Las Vegas, the subject of the documentary Thank You for Supporting the Arts, describes her day job at Maryâs Club. But when the Portland stripper/writer/musician discusses her philosophy about stripping, itâs clear thereâs much more at work. âThe sacred feminine is something that just isnât seen,â she says, echoing a sentiment that Thank You for Supporting the Arts takes pains to illustrate.
When womenâs bodies do appear in art, itâs often through the male gaze. As the Guerilla Girls put it in 1989, âFive percent of the artists in the modern arts section [of the Met] are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.â Hereâs how Viva puts it: She has a background in ballet, but found it to be âa very misogynist stage,â where âa lot of choreography was by menâ and relied heavily on âwomen fainting and falling into menâs arms.â
For Viva, strippingâin which a woman is paid to perform both her own choreography and a mode of emotional and physical laborâis a way of upending these gender dynamics. Sheâs the artist and the subject, the dancer and the choreographer. âThis is art,â she says. âI donât care what kind of dancer youâre talking about... you have to have the confidence and wherewithal to get on that stage.â
Thank You for Supporting the Arts takes its title from what Viva says to her customers, and does something that shouldnât be subversive, but is: It asks a sex worker to define her work for herself, and listens when she does.
Thank You for Supporting the Arts takes its title from what Viva says to her customers, and does something that shouldnât be subversive, but is: It asks a sex worker to define her work for herself, and listens when she does. When we meet in a coffee shop to discuss the film, Viva describes being inspired by early mentors like Mona Superhero, who, she says, âwould almost antagonize the viewerâ in what sounds more like performance art than bachelor party entertainment.
And stripping is a performance. Vivaâs ârealâ name is Liv Osthus, and while âVivaâ is her most public-facing alter-egoâitâs her byline, her stripping persona, the name she signs on her emails, the name she used on Facebook until recentlyâThank You for Supporting the Arts also features another alter-ego, Coco Cobra, the name she uses with her punk band Coco Cobra and the Killers. Whatâs thrilling about Thank You for Supporting the Arts is that it makes no effort to reconcile these alter-egos with each other or to force her to use her given name. Thereâs no attempt to show the ârealâ Viva or Coco. The woman who came up with them is allowed to contain multitudes, to be expansive and fascinating, and, like all of us, to build performative elements into her life.
During the filming of Thank You for Supporting the Arts, Viva allowed the filmmakers to follow her life closely, including private moments like discussions about surviving cancer and depression, her complicated relationship with her parents, and the birth of her daughter. These are all worthy subjects, and lend emotional resonance to what otherwise might have been superficially packaged as a merely salacious âTrue Life: Iâm a Stripper.â
Equally important is that Thank You for Supporting the Arts depicts Vivaâs work as what it is: work. Itâs fulfilling work that she obviously enjoys, but it also enables her to devote time to her writing and music. Sex workers are often stereotyped as desperate, drug-addicted women, but the reality, says Viva, is quite different. She approves of the way sex worker characters were handled in The Wrestler and The Florida Project (âshe was realâ), but itâs a challenge to come up with this short list. And even if the stereotypes were true, says Viva, âIf that were to be somebody I would see, still thereâs that subtext and still thereâs that beauty.â