A Burlesque Gig at an Indonesian-Romanian Wedding
Once upon a time, I was doing a teaching internship at a university in Indonesia. An Islamic university in a city with more than a million people, which you've likely never heard of. And technically I was studying Bahasa, because that's how visas work. Don't tell anyone. Anyway, one of my fellow interns was a guy called Robert. A good-humoured guy with small curls on his head and a big smile on his face, who liked to ride motorcycles and was popular with the local ladies.
Years later, this Romanian paramour surprises me with a wedding invitation to Oradea, Romania. A Romanian wedding? Of course I was going. Playing the starving artist, I offered El Roberto and his chosen one what I believed was the greatest gift of all: a pop-up burlesque act at their wedding party. I packed my feathers, heels, sparkly underwear and headpiece, and in the high heat of summer, set upon this long, land-ridden journey to Transylvania.
Is it Transylvania? I asked in the car. I got a ride with Robert’s awesome friends, a couple from Brussels. She's the person they call when an aeroplane malfunctions to arrange its fixing. I was instantly impressed.
Depends who you ask about Oradea and Transylvania, apparently. While Transylvania brings to mind vampires, mountains and that cool cartoon, Oradea, the capital of Romania’s Bihor County, is pretty flat with no fangs in sight. Located in northwestern Romania near the Hungarian border, the central city of the historic Crișana region is known for its Art Nouveau style and thermal springs. We saw some artwork but avoided the springs, as part of the local healing process seems to be to soak in hot water in the middle of the sweltering summer heat.
After a confusing amount of Google map driving and wrong turns in an area that looked a bit like the high-end suburbs of Oradea. Possibly inspired by American suburbs with endless streets lined with mansion after mansion separated by manicured lawns and high natural fences, we finally arrived at our accommodation.
Sweating in the 35°C summer heat, we entered the air-conditioned living room and found a table full of leftover fast food, far too much alcohol, a few Indonesian snacks and a number of Robert’s guests grinning at us from the table. The man himself had already dressed up and, with his iconic smile and curls, introduced us to the small group of Portuguese, Americans, Latvians, Spanish, Polish, Indonesians and Romanians he had chosen to celebrate the happiest day of his life with.
The swimming pool I was promised turned out to be a jacuzzi with heated water, and to this day I still seem to be the only one raising a sweaty eyebrow at this. Instead of diving in as suggested, I knocked on the room I was to share with the bride’s best friend. The door opens and a pile of aggressively manicured nails pull me inside. It’s 16°C in the room, the air conditioning is set to tornado, the bed and dressing table are full of make-up, loud pop music is blaring from the phone and the place reeks of perfume and hairspray. It hits me - I’m back in Indonesia!
I loved Stefani from the moment I met her. The bride's best friend and maid of honour, this fashion designer from Malang in Java, Indonesia, made me reminisce. When I found out that the bride herself ran a pole dancing studio in Malang, I was sold. Throughout the wedding ceremony and in the days that followed, these women enchanted me.
It was soon time to leave for the big party, and thanks to the groom’s superb organisational skills and the helpful family drivers, we were soon at a restaurant where the bride, groom, maid of honour and man of honour participated in a strange glass breaking ceremony. After making sure a good part of the entrance area was littered with broken glass, we entered a huge restaurant hall with them and greeted what looked like half of Romania.
From then on, it was basically a huge eating and drinking party. Roberto’s foreign friends shared a round table near the dance floor, where a band of different singers played all evening, dropping tunes of everything from traditional to pop, from local to foreign and occasionally, hits from the 80s and 90s. The waiters, like everyone you meet in Romania, were absolutely cheerful and cheeky, furiously filling glasses for the guests and even more furiously downing bottles of Jack Daniels and Absolut vodka. The wedding couple opened the dance floor with a little Elvis classic, and then the party really got going.
With colossal amounts of starters, mains and desserts, watered down with conversation, laughter and spirits of all colours and smells, these people proved to be professionals at partying, and no one seemed to show signs of stomach weakness or impairment of any kind.
Tipsy from the cocktails and exhausted from the quantities of food, I finally found the groom and we agreed with more facial signs than words that it was time. I briefed the DJ, who did the exact opposite of what I had asked him to do and my two stagehands, who would open the backstage door for me and gather the crowd around the dance floor to make the scene more cosy.
The whole idea of the feather dance is to play with hiding and revealing body parts behind the fans. To do this, you need an audience in front of you and a wall behind you. My wall was full of curious bartenders and people who had just come back from the restroom, so they saw the back end of my performance where I hide behind my feathers and make weird body shapes. They must have thought it was some kind of contemporary dance. That's why I love contemporary dance - it can always be blamed for anything bizarre and inexplicable.
The waiters in the back, the audience of bride and groom, young and old, drunks and drunks, crowded shoulder to shoulder around the dance floor in front of me, to my left and right, I flapped those feathers nice and slow to some jazzy trumpets and piano and twisted into an energetic Charleston surprise that morphed into a cute little improv, finishing it all off with a cheeky flash of the behind to the end of a drum roll.
After that the mountainous cake was brought and that was a sign for picture taking with the newly weds. The cake was so huge I promised myself I’d jump out of one once. So if you’re reading this and you know anyone who might need a burlesque performer to jump out of a wedding or birthday cake, write to Curmudgeon travels and ask about this particular service.
For me the wedding ended with the elegant kidnapping of the bride, while the groom had to traditionally stay on as the “last man standing”.
The next day Roberto’s family organised a picnic in the back yard where the swimming pool should have been. Huge pots of goulash were prepared and 90s MTV hits were booming from a huge speaker well into the night. I left Oradea a day later, drunk on heat and laughs, impressions and memories from having spent these couple of days in a fusion of a reunion and new unions and impressed with the specific joie de vivre, resulting from a love story between a Romanian adventurer and an Indonesian pole dance entrepreneur.
Originally from Dubrovnik with pan-Slavic roots, Marja was raised in cities across Europe, including Brussels and Ljubljana, before studying in Malta, Lyon and Dublin. More recently she's enjoyed various (moped) adventures in Indonesia and China.