The Disa-burly-tease Project: Slow & Sensual — An Accessible Burlesque Workshop Series

Slow & Sensual is an accessible burlesque workshop series developed by Alyssa Kitt Hanley as part of her Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellowship. The project brings together striptease technique, disability dance, somatic movement, crip time, sensual pacing, horizontality, and rest aesthetics to explore how slowness, access, fatigue, pleasure, and non-normative movement can become generative aesthetic and erotic resources.

Originally developed by Kitt in 2017, Slow & Sensual began as a burlesque movement workshop critiquing burnout, productivity culture, neoliberal time, and the demand for constant movement and acceleration. Its earliest form used slowness, delay, breath, gaze, and suspended time as techniques for erotic attention and stage command.

In 2025, following cancer treatment, Kitt reimagined the workshop through her doctoral research and broader performance project, Disa-burly-tease. The workshop’s original critique of productivity and exhaustion expanded through disability performance studies, crip time, rest, access, and bodily difference as creative methods for sensual performance.

Through guided movement exercises, somatic exploration, journaling, and collective reflection, participants investigate the slow burn: the searing gaze, delayed gesture, erotic pause, intentional projection of energy, and the possibilities of building sensual presence from their own bodyminds rather than able-bodied expectations of speed, stamina, symmetry, or choreographic virtuosity.

Rather than treating access as an accommodation added after the fact, Slow & Sensual begins from access as a creative method. Participants are invited to explore movement from standing, seated, reclining, wheelchair-based, floor-based, leaning, rolling, still, or resting positions. The performer’s own pace becomes the source of tease rather than something to be corrected, accelerated, or hidden.

The New York City iteration, developed with support from Social Practice CUNY and presented in collaboration with the New York School of Burlesque, brings these practices into a community workshop setting. It creates space for disabled artists, burlesque performers, first-time students, and movement practitioners to explore accessible striptease techniques, embodied agency, and sensual self-expression.

The project forms part of Kitt’s broader Disa-burly-tease practice, challenging normative assumptions about virtuosity, stamina, mobility, glamour, and stage presence. The term Disa-burly-tease was coined by disabled burlesque artist Jacqueline Boxx and is used here with attribution.