"It's about reclaiming your body" – Sukki's Story
We were so lucky to meet Sukki at our most recent LIVE Piazza - BACK TO YOU. The theme was all about reinvention, navigating this tricky time of year, and returning to our lives after the pandemic. Having navigated her own challenges, personal discoveries and plenty of reinventions both in her life and career, we felt Sukki was the perfect person to inspire us all and help us start the new school year with a motivated and positive outlook. And she didn’t disappoint!
Read Sukki's story below
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I'm Sukki, otherwise known as Sukki Menon or Sukki Singapora. I'm from an Indian-Singaporean and British background. I’m biracial and had a conservative upbringing. My parents wanted me to study sciences, and discussions around sexuality, body positivity and female sensuality were absolutely not supported within that family – and cultural structure – it just wasn't something that was talked about. And so I did the ‘good thing’ even though I felt like I was born to be an artist. I did what my parents wanted me to do at the time. I pursued sciences and I ended up in IT.
I sat in a corporate office helping with Linux-based operating systems, all very nerdy. But it wasn’t what my soul wanted. Even though I was good at it, I wanted to express myself rather than be confined to what was expected of me. I felt a sense of imposter syndrome, and it wasn’t the first time; growing up biracial I also experienced a sense of unbelonging, as if I was too brown to be fully British, and people made me acutely aware of that, and I was too pale to be fully Indian. So, I grew up with people saying ‘what are you?’ instead of ‘how are you?’ That deeply affected me and through that difference I discovered vintage fashion as a way of finding an identity in something more than the colour of my skin; my gender; my upbringing; my culture, simply just embracing an aesthetic. And you can’t go into the world of vintage fashion without hearing about the word: burlesque.
For those of you who don't know about burlesque, it’s an empowering feminist art form. Although all genders can perform it, it’s intrinsically feminist. It’s sexy, it’s a bit of a tease, but with none of the reveal. Traditionally wearing corsetry, à la Dita Von Teese, you get up on stage and embrace yourself. The onus is on the performer, so you decide what to take off, or not; there's not necessarily any striptease at all, if you decide you don’t want that. It’s about reclaiming your body, feeling confident and knowing that the power of your body is finally yours to own.
So I was absolutely drawn to this world, and around that time I heard a burlesque club had opened down the road from me. I don't know what possessed me, but I knew I had to go – sometimes in life you see a green light and you have to go for it, even if you don't have experience. Men do it all the time! You know, you step into a boardroom and somebody asks you ‘are you capable? Do you have the skills?’ Statistically, more often than not cis men say yes, and they’ll figure it out later. We, everyone else, tend to say that we're not sure. So, I really put myself in that mindset of ‘yeah I can do burlesque!’ I marched on down to that club with no experience, I'd just heard about burlesque on the internet as an IT nerd, and I said, ‘I can do it. Give me a job.’ And to my horror, they said ‘you start next Friday’. So I had seven days to teach myself professional striptease on YouTube. I was about to perform for a theatre of 300 people, and I’d never done it before. I did it and it went horribly wrong, actually. Things got stuck – who knew that you have to attach a ribbon to a zip in order to remove a dress backwards? I didn't know. I learned by fire.
But the spirit of burlesque is to have fun and not take yourself too seriously. And so I ended up being good at it, but I didn't realise that, being an Indian-Singaporean woman, it wasn't going to be quite as appreciated back home. When I travelled back to Singapore, I found out that no licenses were granted for burlesque. It was effectively banned under public indecency laws.
It was then I realised that I had come across burlesque for a reason. And it wasn't just my personal journey. I'd been put on this planet to help people express themselves, and I embarked on a four-year journey to change the law. I campaigned to make it a legitimate art form. And after four years of campaigning, I won. And I became the first woman in history to perform a full burlesque striptease publicly in Singapore, and irrevocably changed the landscape of burlesque, along with the many people who came before me and will come after me. I was part of changing the landscape so that people could express themselves and their sexuality and not be confined by the patriarchy.
That led to an invitation to be on Netflix. Within a fairly short space of time I ended up with a show on Netflix, a billboard in Times Square, and that leads us to Covid times. I'd just come out of Los Angeles and I had been travelling the world, so when Covid hit this huge momentum that I created in both my career and my platform I’d been using to amplify my voice to push through change just fell beneath my feet.
It was the ultimate leveller for so many of us. I might have just filmed a show on Netflix, but none of that mattered because this was a grounding experience we were all sharing, we were all trapped in our homes. I felt as if I had lost so much, not historically speaking, but I didn't have access to a way of expressing myself and I certainly had the trepidation of not having a direction.
My hair was rainbow coloured without a cause and I was vivacious, but without a stage. To be an artist without a stage is to be a human without a soul. So I found myself on a very transformative journey of self-discovery, like many of us privileged enough during Covid to go on a soul-searching journey to actually redefine and rediscover ourselves without everything – especially material things – that we thought made us who we are. And through this, I realised that I had to strip myself back (no pun intended); to become comfortable with my hair its original colour, to rediscover the talents of not just being a burlesque artist but actually casting that away and simply becoming a human making a difference.
I was already gravitating towards television and expressing myself in a different way, but this was the catalyst to doing so in a simpler way with no frills. Whilst there was a greater mission that had been in the background of everything I'd done, the year of the pivot brought it out of me in abundance and with clarity. It hadn't been to just be some rainbow-haired personality with a Netflix show. The whole raison d'être was to push back against the taboos and resistance that I had experienced. I realised, stronger than I had ever felt before, that I had been brought to this planet to help people realise their dreams; to somehow share my light and inspire people. No matter what your adversity, you can still move mountains and make your dreams a reality with enough self-belief and confidence. And that’s coming from somebody who was a nerdy IT geek with no support, literally fighting to pay her bills and her rent! So, if I can do it, you can do it!
And if anyone wants to reach out for any help or advice please know that my DMs are always open.