We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kellita Maloof. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kellita below.

Kellita , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

I work in an underground artform. An artform that affords more freedom of expression than most forms of performing arts: burlesque. And even in this underground, DIY artform, over the years, I’ve noticed the same pitfall of performing for external validation that exists in the greater performance world, and in most contexts in our world for that matter.

I couldn’t have articulated this 20+ years ago when I started performing burlesque, but I can name it now: I was seeking to feel like myself, to feel more like me. Not to feel like an idealized version of me, or to feel like someone else or an alter ego. Like ME. To simply feel like me. And to embody my full right to exist. And to know it with all my senses. And to move my body with my own agency and experience my own sovereignty. To be the Life in a body that I AM. It feels so good right now to simply write this. I feel affirmed from the typing of the very words. Deep sigh of relief.

But I didn’t always see this relief in my fellow performers as they prepared for the stage … and as they returned from the stage to dressing room after their acts. I more often than not witnessed anxiety and second guessing: “did I forget a part?” … “did I mess up the turn?” … “did my veil get stuck in my hair?” … things of this nature. Some form of “did I get it right?” … “did I give them what they want?” … “did I make the grade?”

They were tracking for external validation. Which is what humans have been trained to track for in not just theatrical performance, but performance of any kind: work performance, relational performance, essentially how we show up as humans in any context. We have been schooled for millenia to consider ourselves objects and look to the feedback we get from audience members – or bosses, or spouses, or parents – who serve as the subjects whose experience of us we hold as the truth.

And the sad thing is that those audience members, bosses, spouses, parents, etc. are not trained to view us as subjects. None of us humans are trained to witness other humans in any context – performance-based or not – as subjects. We are conditioned to witness each other as objects. To ask ourselves in a passive way, “Do I like what I’m seeing?” … “Does what I’m seeing measure up?” … “Does what I’m watching please me?” … “Does it tick all the boxes?”

DOH!, it’s so hard for me to bring my attention to this topic and not get all fired up really quickly.

It’s not our fault that our first response to seeing another human is not for our mouths to drop open in wonder. And for us to drop to our knees in amazement. It’s been conditioned out of us through generational and systemic traumas of all kinds.

Then why is it that I experienced the burlesque stage in particular as a safe place to express my tender self? Honestly, I’m still trying to figure that one out, lol! And, believe you me, I felt the uncomfortable “objecthood” of not being seen plenty offstage. Yet something about the 3-5 minutes onstage felt safe to me. Like it was clear that the moment my song began, it was time to breathe fully. All the energy it took to hide, I could release. It was time to shine, to let my natural, radiant essence be seen.

I began using the burlesque stage as my gym to practice feeling like myself. And building up my tolerance of embodying my own self and feeling like my own self enough so I could bring myself out into “the wild” (ie everywhere that is not the burlesque stage).

I’ve come to believe that somehow I was changing the unspoken question(s) that audience members were asking themselves as I was performing in front of them. And the way I believe I changed their questions was by me changing the questions I was asking myself as I performed. Rather than asking myself, “Am I pleasing the audience?” I was asking myself, moment-by-moment, “How does it feel to be me right now?” and “What would feel even better?”

By asking myself those questions, by putting those questions into the field, those questions germinated in the consciousness of some of the audience members and they, in turn, began asking themselves, “How does it feel to be me, in the presence of this artist sharing of herself?”

This shift in inquiry, this shift from subject-object to subject-subject, changes everything. And awakens the power inherent in performance to transform everyone in the room to feel and be more themselves. And it ricochets back and forth between subject and subject, with each person coming more alive with each pass.

It’s awakening, it’s enlivening, it’s orgasmic. It’s worth the price of admission to this human party.

Kellita , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Greetings! I’m Kellita, a Performing + Teaching Artist and Conscious Burlesque Mentor, known lovingly as The Showgirl Shaman.

I teach and practice performance as “unperformance.”

I use the construct of performance as a practice for being oneself, rather than performing oneself … performing to NOT perform, lol!

It’s so much better experienced than it is spoken of! Truly true.

I teach performance as a way to heal from attachment trauma and relational trauma (which, if you ask me, we all suffer from … it’s just a matter of degree).

I use showgirl, cabaret and burlesque performance art, both troupe and solo expressions, to this end.

It’s never about aiming to be funny or sexy or anything other than the full, complex and perfect symphony of experience and expression that is YOU.

It’s about coming out of freeze and numbness to FEEL, with all your senses.

And then to reveal what genuinely feels GOOD to share with others.

If the context is a burlesque solo, your job is to stay awake and pay exquisite attention to how it feels to be you every second of your act.

And if you’ve planned to remove your bra at certain trill of the trumpet in your song, yet you don’t feel like it when that part of the music arrives: then you change your choreography right then and there! No overriding, no numbing out, no defaulting to what you planned to do.

I have a motto: “Never, Ever, Ever Show A Disembodied Boob!”

I offer high touch, live online and live in-person performance experiences, including Burlesque from the Inside Out and Carnaval Showgirl Awakening.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I knew it would take some time and nurturance for Hot Pink Feathers, my new dance company to be able to support me, so I specifically started a new parttime job to do until my business was grown enough to support itself and me.

I’d been teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) and training teachers of ESL at the time and knew that I would need to stop that before I started my business, since teaching is both extroverted and never-ending work. You’re always planning a class or reviewing homework. I knew that my parttime job while I grew my business needed to have these qualities:

1) introverted
2) fully benefitted
3) could learn on the job any new skills
4) require no more education than I currently had (BA)
5) have no work related tasks outside of work hours at all

I discovered a job I never even knew existed and that bridged me all the way to a business that could support me! I was a Psychometrist (aka a neuropsychological testing technician). I was the right arm of Chief of Neuropsychology at a Kaiser hospital.

This job allowed me to absolutely leave everything at work when I left. I had no scheduling to do, no paperwork to catch up on. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.

All my energy outside of that parttime job went to creating and nurturing my business, which for the first 10 years was focused on running a dance company called Hot Pink Feathers (which I still lead and perform with annually in the Carnaval SF Grand Parade, 24 years later!).

I created the costumes.
I created the choreography.
I taught the classes.
I trained the dancers.
I got us booked for gigs (the first one ever we were the entertainment at a Christmas party for a group of sexworkers in San Francisco at Marlene’s Drag Club in Hayes Valley on December 17, 2000, while the club still existed).

So for 10 years, I taught dance classes, choreographed troupe dances, led rehearsals, booked gigs, gigged, designed and co-created costumes, toured as a troupe and a soloist.

And at the same time I maintained my parttime psychometry work, first as 24 hours/week, then after 7 years, I left Kaiser and worked 3 more years for a private neuropsychologist for 3-4 days/month.

I didn’t downshift in hours according to hitting predetermined target income levels from my business. The cues that caused me to step down in hours and finally to walk away were internal cues. I simply could no longer bring my attention to the day job. When I went from parttime to a few days per month it was because I became stir crazy. I could no longer stomach doing filing work and data entry when I had completed my patient testing time. I needed to be able to walk away when my work was done and not clock in and out on someone else’s schedule. I hoped that then I could walk away fully and be exclusively self-employed.

Turns out I was not earning enough to support myself yet, and was lucky to discover an opportunity to work for several days a month for a private doctor and that supplement made the difference I needed for 3 more years. My cue to walk away for good was very clear. I could simply no longer bring my attention to those few days of work. I started making mistakes I never would have made. It was my body, mind and spirit teaming up to say, “Now! Walk, now!”

And I did. And I never looked back.

But a pivot I didn’t expect was waiting just around the corner for me.

I got sick. Not sort of sick. I got really sick.

I was traveling alone in Argentina and found myself unable to eat or drink. Everything I put inside my body made me nauseous.

Since I was alone, there was no one to track me as I fell into a dangerous half alive/half dead state. There was unreliable internet and phone where I was staying, so I was truly cut off.

I was just withering. With no support.

This went on until three weeks later, when I connected with an angel of a doctor who stepped in personally to get me into a hospital and to get an IV with nourishment into my arm, upon which my mind woke up on a dime and I could see for the first time in weeks that I needed to get home, STAT … yesterday really.

Somehow I was able to travel back to the states. And after a near immediate MRI upon arriving home, it was revealed that my entire GI tract was inflamed.

The intensive healing required 2 months in bed, being fed like an infant. Once I could eat again, I ate on the hour, 24 hours a day for days on end. I wish I’d have taken a photo day. I could have made a flip book of me coming back to life. I had lost more than a third of my body weight, and I’m a tiny person.

During my healing, I could use neither the computer, nor the phone. I could barely speak to other humans. I was so close to the veil. I was hyper-sensitive to sensory stimulation.

In this close-to-the-veil state, I was visited by the Divine Feminine. She appeared in her form as the the Awakening Showgirl, who I came to learn is the mother of Hot Pink Feathers. She had some counsel for me, some very business related counsel. After celebrating with me that I was not done with this human life yet, she gave me some marching orders.

She instructed me to begin to apply the same loving kindness that I offered my dancers, students and clients, to myself. And to begin to notice and articulate the deeper levels of healing that had been happening both to me and to my students, so I could more directly facilitate not only the art, but the healing that was connected to it.

She told me to start by studying the movements that I’d primarily choreographed with in the 50 or so dances I’d created so far. To discern the medicine that each movement had been delivering. And to begin to speak about it! And to go on from there, adding to my learning about both neuropsychological and spiritual development through my own training as a healer and to combine this with my expertise as an artist and trainer of artists.

I followed her instructions. You would have to! She’s pretty convincing.

I began calling my work Showgirl Awakening. Hot Pink Feathers dance company remains a child of Showgirl Awakening.

My definition of an Awakening Showgirl is this:

“a woman – or human – who generously reveals her true radiant essence and thereby shows the way for her sisters – or fellow humans”

I began offering what quickly became – and remains to this day – my primary offering in the world: Burlesque from the Inside Out, a small group, high touch program through which I facilitate the creation and performance (in a safe and sacred setting) of a conscious burlesque solo.

I work with highly sensitive women who, like me, have had a history of overediting, overgiving, overextending, people pleasing and appeasing … and are attracted to dance and embodiment and the arts, even if they are intimidated by the thought.

I work with women who are often the rock or the light that others turn to when they need support. Often my student clients are professional helpers of others: coaches, therapists, team leaders, mothers, health care workers.

In this setting they get to receive what they so generously offer to others.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

To feel like myself. To see and feel my true self. And be seen as such. And received as such by others.

And to see and feel others. To see and feel their true selves, too.

And to support others to see and feel and TRUST themselves.

Most of the pain in our world comes from people being improperly mirrored by one another. In our families of origin, at school, at work.

My mission is to awaken folks to their own embodied essential beauty and radiance, one shimmy at a time!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.showgirlawakening.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellitatheshowgirlshaman/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz1-_Y0L4GM&t=5s
• Other: https://www.showgirlawakening.com/quiz
  https://www.showgirlawakening.com/doc

Image Credits

All photo credits to In Her Image Photography, except the Carnaval outdoor group shot (credit to Nino Ellington), the Burlesque from the Inside Out indoor cast shot (credit to Jeff Spirer) and the TEDx shot (credit to Camille Adams).