Everyone attending “Paper Dolls: A Midnight Ballet in the Hudson Valley” will be asked to do something before joining the party: write a postcard to their state representative.
That might sound like an unusual price of admission for an evening of pole dancing, burlesque, drag, contemporary dance, live music, vintage showgirl costumes, rope play, and sensual performances. For Gentle Mothh, the Kingston-based artist and advocate producing the September 18 event at Assembly, political action and pleasure belong in the same room.
“Who’s going to come out to listen to a bunch of policy talk?” Mothh says. “I probably would, because I’m a nerd. But I wanted to do something that was fun.”
“Paper Dolls” will advocate for legislation prohibiting law enforcement officers from having sexual contact with anyone who is a victim, witness, subject, or person of interest in an investigation. New York law already prohibits sexual contact between officers and people in custody, but that protection does not extend to people under investigation. Advocates say the gap exposes sex workers to coercion and abuse during undercover operations. The proposed bill would close it.
Mothh encountered the legislation through her work with Advocates for Safety and Health, a coalition of sex workers, trafficking survivors, health care providers, and advocacy organizations. The coalition’s previous campaign helped establish protections allowing sex workers who witness or experience certain crimes to seek assistance without risking prosecution for prostitution-related offenses.
Lawmakers often tell advocates that they want to know where constituents stand, Mothh says. “Anything that has to do with sex work, the word prostitution, or law enforcement makes them nervous. There’s an assumption that people have conservative values in their constituency.” “Paper Dolls” is intended to make public support visible while introducing audiences to the people most affected by the policy.
The evening begins with what Mothh calls the Paper Dolls Village. Guests can browse vintage clothing from a sex-worker-run shop, sit for a photograph, purchase garments from an online cam performer, receive bodywork, or try a miniature rope-play session with a professional dominatrix. Community organizations will operate mutual-aid and self-care stations, while the postcard table will help attendees identify their representatives and prepare messages.
Act I pairs nine dance pieces with the live debut of Mothh’s album, Paper Thin, performed by Mothh and a band that includes producer Sam O.B., Caleb Oaks, Taylor Tai, and Fauna Echo. Fourteen performers will move through burlesque, pole, drag, and contemporary dance, with the music serving as the score.
The combination grows from Mothh’s own experience as a stripper. She valued an environment where eroticism and nudity were accepted, but eventually found its expectations restrictive. “There was an agreement you made as an entertainer to keep it in that realm of sexiness and beauty,” she says. As a producer, she wants to create room for a wider range of expression, integrating “the ethereal and the bodily, the sexy, the earthy, the shadow realms.”
After an intermission, attorney Becca Cleary of Decriminalize Sex Work will explain the proposed legislation and Assembly Sarahana Shrestha will also speak. KWD of the sex-worker-led Ishtar Collective will then introduce the house rules and club etiquette before Act II begins.
That second act is the Midnight Ballet, a pop-up strip-club experience performed exclusively by current and former adult-industry workers. The term itself comes from a euphemism for stripping, but Mothh also embraces the tulle, heightened femininity, and theatrical fantasy it suggests.
The entire event is sex-worker-produced, from its security protocols and house rules to the system for exchanging money. Those working conditions are “part of the canvas,” Mothh says, shaped through conversations with performers about what will allow them to work comfortably and safely.
“Our society has deemed sex workers incapable of telling our own stories and has decided we are unworthy of inclusion in history or in the cultural conversation,” she says. By building the evening on their terms, Mothh hopes audiences will see sex workers as artists, professionals, and neighbors—and recognize the personal risks involved in making themselves visible.
Mothh describes “Paper Dolls” as a temporary version of the world she wants to inhabit: beautiful, erotic, collaborative, and governed by agreements its participants create together. “And at some point,” she says, “we’ll have to go home.”
“Paper Dolls: A Midnight Ballet in the Hudson Valley” will be presented September 18 at Assembly in Kingston. Doors open at 7pm and the show begins at 8pm. The event is 21 and older.
