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For questions regarding classes on this page email Alyssa Kitt.

Slow & Sensual is an accessible burlesque movement workshop that invites performers to slow down, deepen their sensual presence, and build erotic charge through gaze, breath, delay, touch, stillness, and intentional movement. Developed by Alyssa Kitt, the workshop brings together striptease technique, somatic movement, disability dance, crip time, and sensual pacing to explore how tease can emerge from each performer’s own bodymind rather than from able-bodied expectations of speed, stamina, verticality, or virtuosity. Through guided movement, reflection, and practical slow-burn exercises, Slow & Sensual treats access as a creative method and celebrates slowness, pleasure, fatigue, rest, and non-normative movement as powerful aesthetic and erotic resources.

OPEN LEVEL WORKSHOP

Access note
This workshop welcomes Deaf, blind, disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and mobility-device-using participants. Movement material will be verbally described and adaptable across standing, seated, reclining, floor-based, still, resting, and mobility-device-based options. Participants are welcome to bring any mobility devices, comfort props, or access tools they use.
Dress for movement and comfort. *ASL interpretation available by request. Please request by Sunday 2nd August so we can confirm an interpreter and share preparation materials in advance.*

About Your Instructor
Alyssa Kitt Hanley is a burlesque performer, teacher, researcher, and Disa-burly-teaser whose work explores striptease, sensuality, disability, and the politics of performance. Known as the “Siren with the $7 million smile,” Alyssa began her burlesque career in Australia in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades developing work around tease, stage presence, slow-burn sensuality, and embodied performance practice. Her teaching invites students into burlesque as a practice of erotic self-authorship, confidence, pleasure, and embodied agency, with a strong commitment to access and bodily difference. Alyssa is an award-winning performer, producer of Mx Burlesque Australia, Director of the Australian Burlesque Museum, a Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow, and a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research focuses on erotic performance, burlesque, disability, and dance. She is also a cancer survivor and beauty activist championing facial difference, and is passionate about creating burlesque spaces where sensuality, difference, and self-directed movement are celebrated as sources of power.