There are several velvet-rope bars on Christie Street in Manhattan, in a section of the city formerly reserved for lower-income working class immigrants, especially Ukrainians, Italians, and Germans. The Europeans gathering on the outside of the ropes are hardly working class, however; everything they’re wearing is either designer or ironic, and the price they’ll have to pay a for bottle of champagne or vodka in the club is about what it would cost to have that bottle flown in singly in its own airplane seat.
At one of the newest bars, The Box, there is a sudden rush of circus-like characters who file out of the building next door, zip through the ropes and past the doorman, and surge purposefully into the club. Among all the outrageous costumes and surreal demeanors, two statuesque and identical blonde women stand out. They aren’t the Olsens; that’s for sure.
The circus folks, some of whom really are circus folks, are the variety artists—singers, dancers, jugglers, and indescribable cabaret personalities—who perform in The Box’s live show. Their dressing room is in that separate building, and in the winter it’s truly amazing to see them, some with dull coats hiding half their glamour but their theatrical makeup unmistakable, others determinedly scantily clad in the frigid air. Always visible in minimal costume, but somehow clothed in their otherworldly air, the pair of identical blonde women are always poised, insular, and stunning in their unfathomable glamour. They are a performance art duo called the Porcelain Twinz.
Formerly of Portland, now happily in New York, the Porcelain Twinz blend dance, fetish, striptease, and a sex-industry sensibility into their work, which they call “fetish burlesque.” And yes, they really are twins.
The Twinz are upfront about every aspect of their lives as if being exposed is not only a state they achieve onstage when they strip, but a goal they are determined to meet on every level of personal and public engagement. They are warm and charming, if occasionally unsettling when both of them turn with identical smiles and speak in chorus: “Hi, Jo!” You can ask them anything and they will tell you everything, inviting dialogue about everything from the definition of performance art to their reactions to being perceived as incestuous.
Their co-written autobiography is called Our Life in the Sex Industry, and begins with the Twinz imagining themselves together in the womb before they were born in Portland in 1976. They describe themselves as now “trying to reshape the way the public views nudity.”
After making it through their teens as tomboys, focusing primarily on riding horses and participating in sports together, Amber began stripping in Portland, where there are supposedly more clubs per capita than in any other US city (Las Vegas has about 6 clubs per 100,000 residents, Portland about 8). A month later, Heather had dropped out of Fresno State and returned to the city, and Amber invited her to join her onstage. Both of them were initially disappointed, if not repelled, by the rather unglamourous state of the clubs, but excited by the financial potential. They worked at the 505 Club, which featured a night called “Double Trouble,” during which there were two dancers per stage all night long—an irresistibly perfect concept night for the sisters.
A few years later they became involved in Portland’s fetish scene; in 1997, the Twinz told me, Fetish Night was the only venue for performance artists in the city. Their own performances at the time fell in between “stripping and obscurity,” and by 2000, when the fabled Dante’s evolved out of Fetish Night, they were ready for weekly performances and had the opportunity to polish and fully develop their acts. They honed their aesthetic into a Weimar-esque circus and produced a DVD, The Masked Charade, in 2006. The box cover describes the video as “a highly stylized, dark, decadent, and ambient film that captivates the audience with a foray of visual vignettes that take you through a dream-like voyeuristic fantasy with the Porcelain Twinz and their fifty erotic performers dazzling the screen.” It features original music from solely Portland-based bands, including The Dandy Warhols, King Black Acid, My Regrets, Television Eye, TV:616, Papillon, Vito Y Cocoa, Tea Secret Society, Sardonic Grin, Miss Behaven, and the Porcelain Dollz.