Since 2014, Vermont has hosted a burlesque festival akin to one you might find in Las Vegas. The five-day extravaganza features performers flown in from as far as Australia, a black-tie red carpet, a charity auction to raise money for breast cancer research and workshops on the art of the tease.
But this will be the Vermont Burlesque Festival‘s final year in its current form, according to executive producer Cory Royer. Attendance has dwindled, and the event is losing money. Royer said he is considering downsizing the festival or finding cheaper venues outside Burlington, where he feels that ticket buyers are deterred by downtown safety concerns.
“As much as our diehards love it, I can’t keep doing something if we’re losing money,” Royer said. “This is not a nonprofit.”
About 1,400 people attended last year’s fest — 400 fewer than in 2023 — which put the event a few hundred dollars in the red. This year, Royer hopes acclaimed headline performers Jessabelle Thunder and Tito Bonito will help turn things around. The festival runs from Wednesday, January 15, to Sunday, January 19, at the Barre Opera House and venues across Burlington, including the 126, Nectar’s and Hotel Champlain.
Putting on five days of programming doesn’t come cheap, and the fest has struggled with its bottom line throughout its history. Each year’s entertainment costs roughly $70,000 to produce, Royer said. He personally finances it using money earned from his day job running a media production company, PhotoGraphic TV. Royer doesn’t take a salary and invests any profits back into his production business. While the fest’s best-attended year, 2020, generated about $16,000 in profit, Royer said he’s lost money across the event’s 11-year run.
Festival expenses include venue rentals, performance fees and flights for traveling talent, advertising, insurance, and paying musicians, tech workers, security and ushers. Royer’s partner, Karen Dorey, helps him with logistics.
Only headliners are paid, while other artists pay $40 to apply to perform. Royer acknowledged that can be a tough sell, so he provides performers with professional headshots and high-definition photos and videos of their acts — resources he hopes will help them land paid gigs in the future.
“For me to be able to pay all 150 performers, the cost of this festival would go up incredibly,” Royer said. “So would the ticket price, and then we would [in] no way be able to pull this off.”
“We have an uphill battle to educate people that this is an art form.” Cory Royer
Revenue comes from ticket and merchandise sales, performer registration fees, and sponsors. Ticket sales account for about 80 percent of the festival’s income, with prices varying based on the night, from free nightclub mixers to $152 staged spectacles. Sponsorships typically make up 10 to 20 percent of revenue, though Royer noted that convincing businesses to associate their brand with burlesque is no easy task. (Disclosure: Seven Days is among this year’s sponsors.)
“We’re risqué. We are an adult-themed event, and it’s not easy for, say, a bank or a credit union to put their name on an event like this,” he said. “We have an uphill battle to educate people that this is an art form, and it’s not what you find in a strip club.”
Burlesque performers, Royer explained, theatrically undress as part of a highly choreographed routine, often incorporating storytelling, humor and satire. Unlike at a strip club, there aren’t lap dances or audience members tossing dollar bills at the stage. Typically, women make up about three-quarters of audience members at the Vermont festival.
People who have experienced a bodily change often find burlesque to be an emotional experience, Royer added, from breast cancer survivors embracing their mastectomies to transgender performers strutting their stuff onstage.
“Some people find burlesque as a way to feel confident with themselves. They find it very empowering to get onstage to show, Hey, this is my body. I love it. It’s beautiful,” he said, “To watch an audience respond positively to that, that’s when tears start to flow.”
But sex appeal isn’t not part of the show.
“I love the music, the corny jokes, the profanity,” said longtime attendee Mark Hitchcox, a 64-year-old Fairfax resident. “But let’s face it: You have loads of scantily clad women shaking their tassels. What’s not to love?”
Royer, 48, grew up in Colchester and worked as a video journalist at WCAX-TV in Burlington after college. Then he moved to Las Vegas, where he joined the CBS affiliate station KLAS-TV. In 2005, he started a videography company and worked on television shows such as “Guy’s Big Bite” and “Aarti Party” on Food Network. He moved back to Vermont in 2020 and lives in Winooski.
Royer was first exposed to burlesque in 2008, when his then-girlfriend took him to a show in Los Angeles. Inspired by the performance, the couple decided to host a monthly burlesque show at a venue beneath the pier in Redondo Beach, Calif.
In 2014, Royer bought the logo and mailing list for the existing Las Vegas Burlesque Festival from a friend for around $3,500 and took over its operations. But the fest only netted around $2,000 in its best year, and Royer was forced to shut it down about five years later.
Also in 2014, while visiting his home state for the holidays, Royer hosted a one-night event at Higher Ground in South Burlington — the seed of what would become the Vermont Burlesque Festival. He thought a burlesque festival would have less competition in Vermont than in Vegas and thus have more success.
The Vermont version quickly outgrew its initial venue, expanding to the Barre Opera House in 2015 and later staging performances at ArtsRiot and the Flynn in Burlington. The fest became mildly profitable in 2018, making $1,600. Attendance peaked in 2020 but has dwindled in the years since. The 2021 festival was virtual, due to COVID-19.
While last year’s performance at the Barre Opera House, which seats 645, sold out, Royer attributes the festival’s downturn to public safety issues in Burlington. In a Facebook post last year, he asked followers if downtown Burlington safety concerns were preventing them from buying tickets. According to Royer, “Within hours, this thing had a thread of, like, 200 responses, and overwhelmingly, the answer was, ‘Yes, I don’t go downtown. Yes, my friend got their car broken into. Yes, the homeless make me uneasy. Yes, there’s too many shootings.’ … It was very clear that that’s why people weren’t coming.”
To help attendees feel safer, he had festival security monitor the nearby parking garage during the downtown showcase performance and walk them to their cars at the end of the night. Still, the show had unsold tickets.
“For a team to work on this for eight-ish months and then to not get paid, or only to get paid a couple of dollars — that’s tough,” Royer said. “And if there’s a loss in income, it comes out of my pocket.”
A scaled-back fest would also be a loss to performers, such as Kitty Kin-Evil, an Ottawa resident who has performed at the Vermont Burlesque Festival since its inception. Performing burlesque is her full-time job, and festivals like Vermont’s are important gigs.
“At this point, it’s almost like a small family reunion — I’ve done it for so many years,” she said. “I have a fan base there. People look forward to seeing me, and I look forward to seeing them.”
Royer said his love of burlesque has enabled him to endure years of losing money or barely breaking even. But eventually, it makes sense to walk away.
“I would prefer not to move it out of downtown. But I need the support of sponsors and ticket holders,” he said. “I can’t hold this ship up on my own.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Last Dance? | The Vermont Burlesque Festival returns, facing an uncertain future”
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.
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