Where are Indian students going to study abroad?
Traditional destinations shouldn’t take Indian students for granted as they look at more exotic options
Matt Salusbury reports
This article first appeared in the English language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008
India is a huge market for English-medium higher education courses. We emailed India-based subscribers to our digital newsletter asking them about where Indians are going to study abroad.
According to ELT professionals the US, UK and Australia are the most desirable destinations for Indian students. One also mentioned Canada, while another identified Singapore as a big destination.
Which markets are growing as destinations for Indian students? ‘Australia is becoming more attractive. Europe is the next attraction because they are more friendly and affordable,’ said one. Another view was that ‘Australia, Singapore and Russia are gaining fast. Many medical students are also looking at options in China and Russia as studies there are less expensive than India and the US and the UK.’
Australia and Singapore are perceived by Indian students as countries for which it’s relatively easy to get student visas. Germany and France have a reputation for advantageous arrangements for student grants and tuition fees, with France in particular becoming a favoured destination for research students.
One respondent told us, ‘Many Ielts candidates state that they are going to Australia because they have heard that getting an Australian visa is easier than getting a visa to the UK and US.’ Universities Australia last year signed ‘international counterpart agreements’ on student exchanges with India, which should result in more Indian students in Australia.
When it comes to visa hassles for the US and the UK, we were told that these two countries are ‘feared’ by Indian applicants.
A sharp fall in the quota of H1-B work visas issued by the US for skilled professionals, capped at 65,000 visas per year after 9/11, was keenly felt by the non-resident Indian diaspora, and the assumption seems to have taken hold that student visas are also much harder to get.
What reasons do Indian students give for choosing a course abroad, and why don’t they instead choose to study at one of the over 113 higher education institutes in India? Admission to specialised higher education courses within India is seen as limited, with ‘candidates screened with stringent entrance exams’ and the policy of positive discrimination making access to these institutes difficult for those not covered by ‘reservation’ – keeping a percentage or quota of university places for applicants from lower castes. Other factors attracting Indians to study overseas are ‘better job prospects, greater status in society and larger pay packets after studies.
Indians abroad mostly study ‘postgraduate and technical courses – MBA, commerce-related and applied sciences are the preferred courses. Most students go abroad for postgraduate studies, although the number of students opting for undergraduate studies abroad is also up.’
It’s clear that the traditional destinations for Indian students had better watch out. Increasing numbers of Indians are going to study in countries that aren’t even regarded as English-speaking – Germany, which issues student visas to Indians for postgraduate study only, France and the rest of Europe, Singapore and even China and Russia for medical training.
It seems to be a difficult process to open a joint venture university in India, with probationary periods of state approval to go through and huge ‘security deposits’ payable to prevent a foreign university closing up after only a few years and stranding the students. But some of the traditional markets for Indian students are establishing a foothold in India beyond the usual recruitment office they have based there.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s India visit last year saw the launch of the UK–India Education and Research Initiative. Coventry University is now running a physiotherapy degree with Bangalore’s MS Ramaiah Technology Institute, and University of London’s external study business courses can now be taken at the University of Delhi. Open Universities Australia also has centres in four Indian cities. US universities such as Yale are hoping to open greenfield site campuses in India. It’s likely that more Indian students will in time go for a higher education course with a foreign university based in India, rather than actually going abroad.
Thanks to Francis Peter, who is a teacher trainer at Loyola College Chennai, and to Hutoxi Randeria, who is a freelance educational consultant.
Copyright: English Language Gazette
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Head for the Highlands
Scotland’s distinctive higher education system is increasingly attracting international students from around the world
Matt Salusbury writes
This article first appeared in the English Language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008
Scotland’s education system is widely regarded as the best in the UK. It has traditionally had proportionally more university places than the rest of Britain. Some of its universities are much older institutions than even Oxford or Cambridge, with one group of Scottish universities known collectively as ‘ancient universities’.
Figures supplied by Scottish Universities for students in higher education in Scotland put the total number of students (both UK and international) at 223,000. Of these, 12,500 were overseas students from other EU countries and 24,000 were from outside the EU. Some overseas students may find their school-leaving qualifications actually put them at an advantage when applying for Scottish universities compared to other UK entrants. This is because Scotland has a different system, with ‘Highers’ school leaving exams leading to a four-year degree in a Scottish university, compared to A-levels leading to a three-year degree in the rest of the UK. Susannah Lane, a researcher with the Scottish Universities association says the ‘perception of the four-year degree as the gold standard in education serves as a pull factor. Another big draw is Scotland’s ‘research base which is known internationally to be world class’. A comfortable majority of international students are in Scotland on postgraduate courses, and half of these are on research-based rather than taught ones.
Kelly Ferguson of Education UK Scotland suggests a ‘vast array of reasons’ why students chose Scotland, including ‘friends or family connections… safety and security on campus (and) culture - traditional and modern.’ She also cites the range of scholarships available for study there.
The most popular subjects for overseas students are business, which just beats engineering, then computing, biological sciences and ‘medicine-related.’ The ‘Watt’ in Heriott-Watt University commemorates Scottish engineer James Watt, and Napier University is named after a mathematician. Both of these universities pull in a lot of international students in these subjects, with Heriott-Watt recruiting many overseas architecture and business students too. Glasgow University seems to specialise in attracting overseas biologists. Strathclyde University had over 700 international students on its business courses in 2007.
But two less well-known universities seem to have carved out niche markets for foreign students. The Paisley-based University of the West of Scotland has the most business students from outside the EU, while Robert Gordon University has the most non-EU students in engineering, architecture and computer sciences. Dundee University seems to be doing rather well in recruiting non-EU students taking a variety of subjects.
The number of overseas students on further education (FE) vocational courses is surprisingly low. Of the 50,000 students who do FE courses in Scotland in 2005, only 310 are from other EU countries, and there are only 1,045 non-EU FE students. Non-degree FE courses are a growth market all over the English-speaking world, so this number can be expected to rise, especially given Scotland’s long-held reputation for excellence in technical subjects.
In 2001, there were students from over 100 countries studying in Scotland. The top ten countries of origin for sending students to Scotland as of 2006 were, in numerical order, China with just over 5,000, the US, India with nearly 4,000, Malaysia with over 3,000, Hong Kong with almost that number, closely followed by Ireland, then Canada with 2,000, Germany with 1,980, Greece with 1830. France is tenth, with1,500 students at Scottish universities.
The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has its own 2005–2006 figures for students from outside the EU studying in Scotland, and these list Norway, Nigeria, Taiwan and Japan as the biggest non-EU countries of origin after Canada.
There has been a steady rise in the total number of international students in Scottish universities. HESA figures list India and Nigeria as showing the biggest growth.
Non-EU international student numbers are rising much faster than for students from the rest of EU outside the UK. ‘Other EU’ student numbers have seen only a slight rise overall since the 1990s. While funding arrangements differ slightly in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK, the bigger increase in non-EU admissions could be partly down to the fact that universities can charge these students a lot more, so they become a marketing priority.
And let’s not forget higher education distance learning courses based in Scotland. Scottish Executive figures for 2006 put the total number of distance learning students based overseas at 18,000, and they outnumber the 14,400 who are based in the UK. Most of these distance learning students are postgraduate, with less than a thousand overseas students doing undergraduate first degrees by distance learning.
Matt Salusbury, news and features editor, English Language Gazette
with additional reporting by Michael Bowden
Copyright: English Language Gazette
Matt Salusbury writes
This article first appeared in the English Language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette, May 2008
Scotland’s education system is widely regarded as the best in the UK. It has traditionally had proportionally more university places than the rest of Britain. Some of its universities are much older institutions than even Oxford or Cambridge, with one group of Scottish universities known collectively as ‘ancient universities’.
Figures supplied by Scottish Universities for students in higher education in Scotland put the total number of students (both UK and international) at 223,000. Of these, 12,500 were overseas students from other EU countries and 24,000 were from outside the EU. Some overseas students may find their school-leaving qualifications actually put them at an advantage when applying for Scottish universities compared to other UK entrants. This is because Scotland has a different system, with ‘Highers’ school leaving exams leading to a four-year degree in a Scottish university, compared to A-levels leading to a three-year degree in the rest of the UK. Susannah Lane, a researcher with the Scottish Universities association says the ‘perception of the four-year degree as the gold standard in education serves as a pull factor. Another big draw is Scotland’s ‘research base which is known internationally to be world class’. A comfortable majority of international students are in Scotland on postgraduate courses, and half of these are on research-based rather than taught ones.
Kelly Ferguson of Education UK Scotland suggests a ‘vast array of reasons’ why students chose Scotland, including ‘friends or family connections… safety and security on campus (and) culture - traditional and modern.’ She also cites the range of scholarships available for study there.
The most popular subjects for overseas students are business, which just beats engineering, then computing, biological sciences and ‘medicine-related.’ The ‘Watt’ in Heriott-Watt University commemorates Scottish engineer James Watt, and Napier University is named after a mathematician. Both of these universities pull in a lot of international students in these subjects, with Heriott-Watt recruiting many overseas architecture and business students too. Glasgow University seems to specialise in attracting overseas biologists. Strathclyde University had over 700 international students on its business courses in 2007.
But two less well-known universities seem to have carved out niche markets for foreign students. The Paisley-based University of the West of Scotland has the most business students from outside the EU, while Robert Gordon University has the most non-EU students in engineering, architecture and computer sciences. Dundee University seems to be doing rather well in recruiting non-EU students taking a variety of subjects.
The number of overseas students on further education (FE) vocational courses is surprisingly low. Of the 50,000 students who do FE courses in Scotland in 2005, only 310 are from other EU countries, and there are only 1,045 non-EU FE students. Non-degree FE courses are a growth market all over the English-speaking world, so this number can be expected to rise, especially given Scotland’s long-held reputation for excellence in technical subjects.
In 2001, there were students from over 100 countries studying in Scotland. The top ten countries of origin for sending students to Scotland as of 2006 were, in numerical order, China with just over 5,000, the US, India with nearly 4,000, Malaysia with over 3,000, Hong Kong with almost that number, closely followed by Ireland, then Canada with 2,000, Germany with 1,980, Greece with 1830. France is tenth, with1,500 students at Scottish universities.
The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has its own 2005–2006 figures for students from outside the EU studying in Scotland, and these list Norway, Nigeria, Taiwan and Japan as the biggest non-EU countries of origin after Canada.
There has been a steady rise in the total number of international students in Scottish universities. HESA figures list India and Nigeria as showing the biggest growth.
Non-EU international student numbers are rising much faster than for students from the rest of EU outside the UK. ‘Other EU’ student numbers have seen only a slight rise overall since the 1990s. While funding arrangements differ slightly in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK, the bigger increase in non-EU admissions could be partly down to the fact that universities can charge these students a lot more, so they become a marketing priority.
And let’s not forget higher education distance learning courses based in Scotland. Scottish Executive figures for 2006 put the total number of distance learning students based overseas at 18,000, and they outnumber the 14,400 who are based in the UK. Most of these distance learning students are postgraduate, with less than a thousand overseas students doing undergraduate first degrees by distance learning.
Matt Salusbury, news and features editor, English Language Gazette
with additional reporting by Michael Bowden
Copyright: English Language Gazette
Cultural conversions
English as a Foreign Language teachers tired of the same old grind make ideal candidates for conversion to cross-cultural trainers
Matt Salusbury talks to cross-cultural training experts
This article first appeared in English language teaching industry trade paper English Language Gazette May 2008
There is a lucrative industry in cross-cultural training (also called intercultural training) currently opening up, and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers have obvious transferable skills that can help them benefit from a move into this area. (See pages 16–17 of the March 2008 Gazette for an introduction to the subject.) But what does the job entail, and how do EFL teachers go about becoming cross-cultural trainers?
Neil Payne, of Kwintessential Ltd Cross Cultural Solutions says that trainers come from all sorts of backgrounds. The majority have worked internationally and understand the complexities of working across cultures, are Tefl teachers, have been expatriaes or have grown up in foreign countries and gone into training, and then you also get people nowadays who have taken the academic route into training through an Masters Degree.
Recent graduates of cross-cultural training courses at International House (IH) London include Yu Sun, who teaches Mandarin and trains businesses to work with China, Bryony Kate Howard, who used the cultural training course to convert her language clients in Germany to cultural clients and to get new business, and Rie Ota, a teacher of English and Japanese. Neil feels that EFL is an excellent way into intercultural training as you’ve already had exposure to working and living in a foreign country, and can then become an ‘expert’ in that culture. And through teaching you develop a lot of training skills including confidence in how to manage a group of people.
Barry Tomalin, director of the Business Cultural Trainers Certificate at IH London, also feels that teachers can make good cultural trainers. ‘They used to say in the BBC that it was easier to turn a teacher into a producer than the other way round. It’s the same with cultural training but we need to recognise the differences.’
English teachers, says Barry, have the techniques to help students learn. Cultural trainers are judged by whether they meet the client’s agenda. The clients control the agenda and their agenda is improving business performance in overseas markets or working with overseas teams.
This agenda has to be delivered in blocks of one or two days or half a day, as business managers are extremely busy. It is much closer to management training than to language training. and can be a lot more stressful.
In cultural training the aim is to find out what people need to know to achieve a particular business aim, learn what the business issues are likely to be and then find the right way to address them. The feeling and approach in the training room is very different to the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom.
What have EFL teachers got to offer? We are trained to be aware of and to be able to conceptualise differences in language. We are also trained to teach by activities. We follow the learning cycle of activity, debrief, conclusions and implementation. Cultural trainers tend to talk; language trainers tend to get people to do things. Most language trainers have lived and worked abroad so they understand what it is to live and work in a different environment and have experienced some of the psychological challenges of doing so. This is experience that we can use to the benefit of the managers we are training. We also gain, as a result of living and working abroad, a host of stories that we can use as part of our work.
Barry believes there’s a lot of ‘smoke and mirrors in cultural training. Most trainees have no interest in the culture they are dealing with as such, or if they are interested it tends to be a by-product rather than the aim of their work. Cultural training also has a number of business models, principally those presented by such theorists as Hofstede, Trompenaars, Lewis, Mole and Bennett. You need to know these and to be able to teach a system that your trainees can apply.
Ultimately, what you are teaching is life skills. When working with overseas partners and clients the rules change. Understanding the key communication and business cultural differentiators such as attitudes to time, relationships, decision-making and organisation are crucial to making the right business judgements with foreign clients and partners. What you are doing is teaching these skills and initiating an international mindset which will make your trainees more responsive to international business requirements.
There are three main kinds of course. One type is cultural briefing, exploring what is it like to work in or with people from another country. Then there’s mobility – training people to live abroad, training people to live in the UK or training people to settle in back home after a secondment overseas. And there’s international team building – working with a team which may be a virtual team that communicates through email, phone and video conferencing.
Cultural training and coaching can pay better than language training. Barry says that companies may charge between £1,500 and £2,000 per day and sole traders tend to charge £1,000-plus. Neil says trainers are paid anywhere from £500 to £1,000 per day, and 95 per cent are freelances who work for a number of consultancies. Very few would go into permanent employment as a full-time trainer although some consultancies do have in-house trainers too. Barry says, ‘Your clients initially will probably be companies you know and have previously worked with in the language field, although converting them from language clients to culture clients can take time.’
A number of training companies offer in-house training courses, and companies such as LTS Bath run five-day train-the-trainer courses for aspirant cultural trainers. The IH London Business Cultural Trainers Certificate offers a three-day intensive course in how to research, design, market and deliver courses for managers. There’s also highly rated seminar in Oregon, USA, which takes place at the Intercultural Communication Institute, Summer Institute, run by Milton and Janet Bennett.
Glossary
ELT - English Language Teaching
EFL - English as a Foreign Language
Tefl - Teaching English as a Foreign Language
Matt Salusbury, News and Features Editor, English Language Gazette
Copyright: English Language Gazette
MA - Master of Arts, Masters Degree
Sex and the séance room
This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue 233, March 2008
Kittie Klaw, nipple tassle-twirling, fan-dancing Queen of Burlesque is one of Britain’s best known burlesque and striptease performers, as well as a manager of other burlesque acts and a tutor of striptease skills through her Ministry of Burlesque agency. She’s famous in the fetish scene as a cover model on the front of ‘bondage’ magazines, and as a performer at fetish clubs such as London’s notorious Torture Garden. But – stop tittering at the back there! - I wanted to talk to Ms Klaw about her other passion – parapsychology.
Kittie was celebrating the runaway success of Victorian Values when we met. This is her theatrical-length music hall revue, which sends up the dark side of Victorian hypocrisy, and which had its debut at the suitably grand old Hoxton Hall in East London’s Shoreditch last August. Victorian Values sends up the Victorian séance, and features girls who can carry off that Victorian look well, and who look the part in period ‘tight lace-up corsets.’ Kittie directs and plays several characters in the show, including the two de Winter-Fairbottom twins, Kittie and Lilly. One is a bit of a prude, the other is ‘more experimental.’
Of her plans for future productions of Victorian Values, Kittie says that ‘a West End theatre performance is the Holy Grail at the moment.’ At the time of writing, there was a possible TV adaptation in the pipeline in collaboration with Robin Ince, who is part of Ricky Gervais’ writing team and who appeared in The Office. Meanwhile, a shorter, stand-alone sketch taken from Victorian Values, that ‘sexualises’ aspects of the Victorian séance, is doing the rounds as part of Kittie’s regular repertoire. See www.victorianvalues.info for updates.
We began our chat by discussing the connections between Victorian music hall and Spiritualist séances. The expression ‘knocking shop’ to describe a brothel originally comes from the table-rapping spirit world of the séance. The preoccupation with death and ‘the other side’ was often a code for another taboo that couldn’t then be spoken about at all – sex. ‘Sex sells, death compels,’ says Kittie. The hint of eroticism around the séance – sometimes it was more than just a hint – was justified by an ethereal veil of Spiritualist respectability. If you said you believed in the afterlife, you had an explanation when the police came calling and found scantily-clad women in the dark behaving strangely.
Then there’s the example of famous 1850s girl medium Florence Cook (See Fortean Times 179: pages 30-37), who used to disappear into the ‘spirit cabinet’ in séances and give rise to the materialisation of ectoplasmic ‘spirit form’ Katie King, a bawdy character from a pirate family who looked remarkably like Cook, and who would move among the sitters and touch them with remarkably solid hands, and who seemed to enjoy letting the sitters touch her too.
Accordng to Kittie, ‘there has always been a crossover between music hall-style entertainment and belief. Burlesque plays on this.’ Some of the most famous stage mediums, especially the phenomenally popular Davenport Brothers, who started their act in 1859, acknowledged that they were always showmen and never claimed to be mediums. But the Davenports were caught up in the burgeoning Spiritualist movement of the time and their show was hailed as genuine proof of spirit phenomena.
Kittie’s Victorian Values sends up the ‘elaborate farce’ of the Victorian séance. The play’s protagonist, Lord Dashwood, estranged cousin of Queen Victoria, is based on the real Francis Dashwood of the Hellfire Club. In Kittie’s revue, Dashwood is running a fake séance when Queen Victoria walks in, looking to make contact with her dear departed consort Prince Albert. Lord Dashwood panics, but it would be giving away the plot to tell what happens next in the ensuing procession of fake and real phantoms and pint-sized, flapping vampires. Victorian Values also sends up the erotic appeal of Gothic Horror. Kittie describes Gothic Horror’s enduring erotic appeal as ‘legitimised S and M,’ with ‘lots of Freudian sex and death.’ For example, ‘Dracula is the perfect hybrid of Mr Darcy and the Marquis De Sade – ideal husband and depraved sexual mentor in one’.
Victorian Values takes the art of burlesque, which until recently enjoyed a somewhat smutty reputation, back to the traditional burlesque form. Kittie is one of the longest performing artists in the traditional form of burlesque, a tradition for which she vigorously campaigns. Traditional burlesque is a British invention from the 18th century, and to ‘burlesque’ (the word can also be a verb) means ‘to send up, satirise and parody.’ The very first burlesque acts were short operettas, which inspired Gilbert and Sullivan. Trad burlesque could be Blackadder-type historical satire. Napoleon was a favourite subject. P.G. Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster are in the tradition of burlesque, which also mocked the class system as well as history, and told a funny story whilst it satirized taboos. The humour also included what Kittie calls ‘body satire.’
How, then, did the association with American strippers come in? The British burlesque performer and former pub landlady Lydia Thompson, after reaching the pinnacle of the British burlesque world, took her successful act to the US in 1868, with her troupe, the British Blondes – ‘none of whom were actually blondes.’ They may in fact have been among the world’s first peroxide blondes. They were dressed as boys, which meant they could show their ankles.
A variety of complex factors led to American burlesque dropping satire. The Depression, and Prohibition complicated US theatre licensing somewhat, and ‘there was no-class system’ to satirize in America, or at least none that Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes could easily discern. Striptease took over the American burlesque genre, but it was still called ‘burlesque’ because the strip acts alternated with stand-up comics.
Kittie, like Lydia Thompson, came to the performing arts early. Kittie was a professional child ballerina until the age of 12, and some of her burlesque dance routines are en point – right up on tiptoes, ballet-style. But from an early age Kittie showed strong academic achievement, which her school keenly cultivated her science talents. ‘As a girl, if you were one of the few who happened to excel in science, you were automatically pushed to have a career in science.’
A four-year Honours degree in Psychology at Glasgow University followed, with a thesis on ‘remote staring detection,’ in which Kittie felt she got ‘little or no support’ from her department. Glasgow University had just bid unsuccessfully for the Koessler Chair in Parapsychology, (see (See Fortean Times 201: pages 32-39), losing to traditional rivals Edinburgh. While an undergraduate, Kittie was active with the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR), along with astrophysicist Archie Roy. Kittie took part in investigations of a few a cases of hauntings and related phenomena, but never found anything that was convincing beyond someone’s ‘emotional needs.’
Kittie graduated from Glasgow in 2003 with a good mark in ‘straight’ Psychology and was taken on as a student under the personal supervision of Professor Bob Morris, who headed Edinburgh University’s Koessler Unit, to study for an MsC/PHd in Parapsychology.
Her only year at Edinburgh University was ‘the most difficult year of my life.’ The ‘exorbitant’ fees meant she held down a part-time job alongside her full-time research position, and had to scratch around for bits of funding here and there. She set up the Ministry of Burlesque agency at the turn of the 21st century, but the re-emerging burlesque ‘scene’ was still only in London, and she was travelling to and from London from Edinburgh twice a week to perform. She toured student unions and Scottish venues as one of the dancing girls for local cult band Hugh Reed and the Velvet Underpants. As one of the band’s dancing girls she often dressed in a makeshift burkha, which she would rip off for some appropriately costumed comedic belly dancing in the style of Carry On Up the Khyber. Her other dance routine was ‘naughty Nazis, satirical comedy rich in ironic slap-dancing and wrestling, very tongue in cheek.’
Meanwhile, Bob Morris was very supportive, and Kittie has fond memories of ‘many an eccentric chat, end of term parties at his house, (Bob) in his inimitable style, extremely charismatic.’ But Kittie’s research project was dogged by strange mishaps and coincidences.
The experimental part of Kittie’s Masters/PhD research followed from ‘remote staring detection,’ in the area of Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems (DMILS, pronounced ‘dee mills’). ‘You don’t want to say “ESP,” it’s a wee bit “woolly”. It’s a loaded phrase, full of implications… The DMILS research is the examination of a communicative phenomenon which could easily be completely normal but not yet understood. Perhaps even evolutionary.’
At the Koessler Unit, Kittie looked into ‘anomalous transfer of information between creative individuals.’ She found acrobat twins and lifelong double act jugglers from the Edinburgh festival. There were reasonable questions raised by Koessler Unit staff about the definition of ‘creative,’ but Kittie says ‘nobody bothered to point out that the computer system was suspected of being broken at the time. Only after I reported it, did anyone offer the knowledge that it had been acting up for some time, unbeknown to myself or Professor Morris.’ The research seemed to be going OK. It involved one person in a ‘creative’ team meditating on impressions seen by the other in a different room, when they were being shown a random sequence of scenes on video. Kittie became convinced that the sequences weren’t showing in a random order, that they were in an organised pattern.
The department had to take apart the ‘broken’ computer system, to eliminate the possibility it was a computer fault leading to this apparent non-random pattern in video sequences. Instead, Kittie and Bob had to use slides from the 1970s, which were difficult to run, and the subjects they’d brought in for the original experiment with the video begun to move on as the festival left town.
Then ‘the rest of the equipment started to fail.’ Monitors and light bulbs started to go wrong, a computer cable melted. There were so many electrical faults that it became a running departmental joke that Kittie was jinxed. Bob showed her books on people whose very presence messes up experiments. Kittie was ‘trying to be cheerful’ about all this bizarre equipment failure. She called Bob, joking, after the third projector/hardrive/general systems failure: ‘One of us isn’t going to make it to the end of this,’ she told him. And then Bob died suddenly in August 2004 (see obituary in (See Fortean Times 192: pages 26-27) In the time leading up to his death, Kittie had prophetic dreams of attending Bob’s funeral. She took his death as sign that ‘I’m not meant to be doing this.’ Her performing work was taking off by then, and she decided parapsychology was something she could always come back to…
But the paranormal had come into Kittie’s life long before she chose a career in parapsychology. She had a near death experience aged 10, as a result of an allergic reaction. Another childhood experience she describes was a ‘bizarrely accurate vision of the death of Princess Diana a year before she died… A black shadow from the North West coming over Paris, the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel at high speed,’ the feeling that she should ‘watch her back.’ Kittie has also had shared dreams with people, or witnessed other peoples’ dreams as they dream them.
She grew up in East Kilbride, south of Glasgow, although she didn’t know at the time it was a UFO hotspot. The sky round her house would be full of the searchlights of helicopters chasing escapees from the mental hospital over the moors. She remembers one night watching a searchlight moving around in the sky above the woods for ten minutes, ‘then I realised there was no sound beyond the rustling of trees, I couldn’t see a craft, just the light – not a source.’
Kittie’s interest in Ufology extends to a friendship with Ufologist Nick Pope, who got in touch with her after reading her interview in a UFO magazine. Says Kittie of Nick Pope, ‘he’s a lovely gent.’
Fortunately, Kittie saw the funny side of Ufology, as evidenced by the three-minute alien abduction burlesque routine, written by Kittie but still awaiting a debut. This skit ‘burlesques’ (sends up) The X-Files with a chorus line of aliens. It’s got ‘a medical Carry On style sequence, complete with alien surgical clichés referencing what people actually report. Although, as it is a burlesque, we don’t show any of the more “intimate” horrors.’
On a more serious note, Kittie says ‘I still have a problem with electricity… I once famously crashed the whole library network at Glasgow University.’ Bob Morris saw her apparent allergic reaction to electricity, which Kittie’s business partner and fiancé James, an IT expert and world-class programmer, can confirm. Says Kitty, ‘I go through laptops at an alarming rate, I have been known to interfere with TV signals, I get headaches and rashes when vacuum cleaners and computers power up. Light bulbs rarely last around me, cameras often don’t work and I have allergic reactions to the London Underground (seriously!) – I’ve often wondered if it’s the electricity… I get dizzy, over-hot and develop that peculiar rash.’
Then there was the time she participated in an experiment in Glasgow in which electrodes were attached to her head, and they didn’t pick up any data from her at all. This is supposed to happen ‘only if you’re dead.’
BBC Scotland once engaged Kittie as a ‘psychic detective’ as part of a programme that followed young paranormal investigators working in the reputedly haunted Britannia Panopticon Music Hall at Glasgow’s Trongate. At 150 years old, the Panopticon is Britain’s oldest surviving intact music hall. It’s said that it didn’t burn down -– like all the other Glasgow music halls – as there was so much urine soaked into in the wood. Stanley Laurel debuted at the Panopticon aged 16 in 1906, and Kittie has done fundraising gigs for the venue.
The ‘proper investigators’ of Kitty’s SSPR team started with some serious archive research and then set up equipment in various parts of the Panopticon – ‘TV cameras, infra-red cameras, mini-disc digital recorders to record EVP, absolutely nothing happened.’ The BBC team suggested focusing on a mediumship demonstration from a circle of people who believed themselves to be psychic. The result was ‘wordy, incongruous to facts and rather dull actually. It wasn’t data that we could use.’
While Kittie’s team was setting up, there were – understandably given the age of the venue – ‘knocking noises from the pipes (which the BBC got excited about and filmed three times). The suggestion that it was in fact plumbing was vetoed.’ The whole investigation was a ‘non-conclusive event. Those who went in believing came out believing, those who didn’t were unchanged.’
Kittie stressed that the SSPR have many mediums among their members and on its council. SSPR mediums attended the Panopticon vigil as part of the SSPR investigation. For this investigation, ‘myself and a few colleagues were approaching from a scientific viewpoint and had designed the vigil as such. Were at loggerheads with the (other) mediums who showed little regard for the importance of protocol and ignored our requests for structure.’
After the death of Bob Morris, strange stuff continued to happen. During a photo shoot for a fetish magazine at the Erotic Museum of Hamburg, Kittie was posing with straw and porcelain Victorian theatre dummy, when a soft, masculine voice came to her in German, and the dummy’s eyes appeared to look at her. ‘No way! I’ve not enough sleep,’ Kittie told herself. She ‘didn’t tell anyone for a few hours, (thinking) it could be lack of sleep.’ Then she found that the incident coincided with the failure of the photographer’s camera, and her boyfriend said that at the same time he’d chased a light up the museum’s stairs, the same stairs which fellow fetish glamour model Morrigan Hell fell down on a shoot shortly before. ‘So many people had experiences’ of the space, Kittie found out. Photography equipment seizing up on Kittie Klaw modelling shoots is, she says, something that happens often.
For the moment, being a global burlesque glamour phenomenon pretty much precludes a return to professional parapsychology any time soon. Kittie says she remains a sceptic in the academic sense, ‘I haven’t yet formed a firm belief’ one way or another. How does Kittie’s grounding in the science of parapsychology inform how she feels about the strange things that keep happening to her? ‘Studying parapsychology keeps me rational about it. To say that I’m only going to consider certain possibilities, that’s ridiculous… I’ve always maintained my interest in the paranormal… I’m a sceptical enquirer in the academic sense, but a fascinated enquirer with a desire to be convinced.’
‘Sceptic,’ according to Kittie, is a word that has come into disrepute over the years, like ‘burlesque’.
See also www.kittieklaw.com
© Matt Salusbury 2007
Kittie Klaw, nipple tassle-twirling, fan-dancing Queen of Burlesque is one of Britain’s best known burlesque and striptease performers, as well as a manager of other burlesque acts and a tutor of striptease skills through her Ministry of Burlesque agency. She’s famous in the fetish scene as a cover model on the front of ‘bondage’ magazines, and as a performer at fetish clubs such as London’s notorious Torture Garden. But – stop tittering at the back there! - I wanted to talk to Ms Klaw about her other passion – parapsychology.
Kittie was celebrating the runaway success of Victorian Values when we met. This is her theatrical-length music hall revue, which sends up the dark side of Victorian hypocrisy, and which had its debut at the suitably grand old Hoxton Hall in East London’s Shoreditch last August. Victorian Values sends up the Victorian séance, and features girls who can carry off that Victorian look well, and who look the part in period ‘tight lace-up corsets.’ Kittie directs and plays several characters in the show, including the two de Winter-Fairbottom twins, Kittie and Lilly. One is a bit of a prude, the other is ‘more experimental.’
Of her plans for future productions of Victorian Values, Kittie says that ‘a West End theatre performance is the Holy Grail at the moment.’ At the time of writing, there was a possible TV adaptation in the pipeline in collaboration with Robin Ince, who is part of Ricky Gervais’ writing team and who appeared in The Office. Meanwhile, a shorter, stand-alone sketch taken from Victorian Values, that ‘sexualises’ aspects of the Victorian séance, is doing the rounds as part of Kittie’s regular repertoire. See www.victorianvalues.info for updates.
We began our chat by discussing the connections between Victorian music hall and Spiritualist séances. The expression ‘knocking shop’ to describe a brothel originally comes from the table-rapping spirit world of the séance. The preoccupation with death and ‘the other side’ was often a code for another taboo that couldn’t then be spoken about at all – sex. ‘Sex sells, death compels,’ says Kittie. The hint of eroticism around the séance – sometimes it was more than just a hint – was justified by an ethereal veil of Spiritualist respectability. If you said you believed in the afterlife, you had an explanation when the police came calling and found scantily-clad women in the dark behaving strangely.
Then there’s the example of famous 1850s girl medium Florence Cook (See Fortean Times 179: pages 30-37), who used to disappear into the ‘spirit cabinet’ in séances and give rise to the materialisation of ectoplasmic ‘spirit form’ Katie King, a bawdy character from a pirate family who looked remarkably like Cook, and who would move among the sitters and touch them with remarkably solid hands, and who seemed to enjoy letting the sitters touch her too.
Accordng to Kittie, ‘there has always been a crossover between music hall-style entertainment and belief. Burlesque plays on this.’ Some of the most famous stage mediums, especially the phenomenally popular Davenport Brothers, who started their act in 1859, acknowledged that they were always showmen and never claimed to be mediums. But the Davenports were caught up in the burgeoning Spiritualist movement of the time and their show was hailed as genuine proof of spirit phenomena.
Kittie’s Victorian Values sends up the ‘elaborate farce’ of the Victorian séance. The play’s protagonist, Lord Dashwood, estranged cousin of Queen Victoria, is based on the real Francis Dashwood of the Hellfire Club. In Kittie’s revue, Dashwood is running a fake séance when Queen Victoria walks in, looking to make contact with her dear departed consort Prince Albert. Lord Dashwood panics, but it would be giving away the plot to tell what happens next in the ensuing procession of fake and real phantoms and pint-sized, flapping vampires. Victorian Values also sends up the erotic appeal of Gothic Horror. Kittie describes Gothic Horror’s enduring erotic appeal as ‘legitimised S and M,’ with ‘lots of Freudian sex and death.’ For example, ‘Dracula is the perfect hybrid of Mr Darcy and the Marquis De Sade – ideal husband and depraved sexual mentor in one’.
Victorian Values takes the art of burlesque, which until recently enjoyed a somewhat smutty reputation, back to the traditional burlesque form. Kittie is one of the longest performing artists in the traditional form of burlesque, a tradition for which she vigorously campaigns. Traditional burlesque is a British invention from the 18th century, and to ‘burlesque’ (the word can also be a verb) means ‘to send up, satirise and parody.’ The very first burlesque acts were short operettas, which inspired Gilbert and Sullivan. Trad burlesque could be Blackadder-type historical satire. Napoleon was a favourite subject. P.G. Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster are in the tradition of burlesque, which also mocked the class system as well as history, and told a funny story whilst it satirized taboos. The humour also included what Kittie calls ‘body satire.’
How, then, did the association with American strippers come in? The British burlesque performer and former pub landlady Lydia Thompson, after reaching the pinnacle of the British burlesque world, took her successful act to the US in 1868, with her troupe, the British Blondes – ‘none of whom were actually blondes.’ They may in fact have been among the world’s first peroxide blondes. They were dressed as boys, which meant they could show their ankles.
A variety of complex factors led to American burlesque dropping satire. The Depression, and Prohibition complicated US theatre licensing somewhat, and ‘there was no-class system’ to satirize in America, or at least none that Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes could easily discern. Striptease took over the American burlesque genre, but it was still called ‘burlesque’ because the strip acts alternated with stand-up comics.
Kittie, like Lydia Thompson, came to the performing arts early. Kittie was a professional child ballerina until the age of 12, and some of her burlesque dance routines are en point – right up on tiptoes, ballet-style. But from an early age Kittie showed strong academic achievement, which her school keenly cultivated her science talents. ‘As a girl, if you were one of the few who happened to excel in science, you were automatically pushed to have a career in science.’
A four-year Honours degree in Psychology at Glasgow University followed, with a thesis on ‘remote staring detection,’ in which Kittie felt she got ‘little or no support’ from her department. Glasgow University had just bid unsuccessfully for the Koessler Chair in Parapsychology, (see (See Fortean Times 201: pages 32-39), losing to traditional rivals Edinburgh. While an undergraduate, Kittie was active with the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR), along with astrophysicist Archie Roy. Kittie took part in investigations of a few a cases of hauntings and related phenomena, but never found anything that was convincing beyond someone’s ‘emotional needs.’
Kittie graduated from Glasgow in 2003 with a good mark in ‘straight’ Psychology and was taken on as a student under the personal supervision of Professor Bob Morris, who headed Edinburgh University’s Koessler Unit, to study for an MsC/PHd in Parapsychology.
Her only year at Edinburgh University was ‘the most difficult year of my life.’ The ‘exorbitant’ fees meant she held down a part-time job alongside her full-time research position, and had to scratch around for bits of funding here and there. She set up the Ministry of Burlesque agency at the turn of the 21st century, but the re-emerging burlesque ‘scene’ was still only in London, and she was travelling to and from London from Edinburgh twice a week to perform. She toured student unions and Scottish venues as one of the dancing girls for local cult band Hugh Reed and the Velvet Underpants. As one of the band’s dancing girls she often dressed in a makeshift burkha, which she would rip off for some appropriately costumed comedic belly dancing in the style of Carry On Up the Khyber. Her other dance routine was ‘naughty Nazis, satirical comedy rich in ironic slap-dancing and wrestling, very tongue in cheek.’
Meanwhile, Bob Morris was very supportive, and Kittie has fond memories of ‘many an eccentric chat, end of term parties at his house, (Bob) in his inimitable style, extremely charismatic.’ But Kittie’s research project was dogged by strange mishaps and coincidences.
The experimental part of Kittie’s Masters/PhD research followed from ‘remote staring detection,’ in the area of Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems (DMILS, pronounced ‘dee mills’). ‘You don’t want to say “ESP,” it’s a wee bit “woolly”. It’s a loaded phrase, full of implications… The DMILS research is the examination of a communicative phenomenon which could easily be completely normal but not yet understood. Perhaps even evolutionary.’
At the Koessler Unit, Kittie looked into ‘anomalous transfer of information between creative individuals.’ She found acrobat twins and lifelong double act jugglers from the Edinburgh festival. There were reasonable questions raised by Koessler Unit staff about the definition of ‘creative,’ but Kittie says ‘nobody bothered to point out that the computer system was suspected of being broken at the time. Only after I reported it, did anyone offer the knowledge that it had been acting up for some time, unbeknown to myself or Professor Morris.’ The research seemed to be going OK. It involved one person in a ‘creative’ team meditating on impressions seen by the other in a different room, when they were being shown a random sequence of scenes on video. Kittie became convinced that the sequences weren’t showing in a random order, that they were in an organised pattern.
The department had to take apart the ‘broken’ computer system, to eliminate the possibility it was a computer fault leading to this apparent non-random pattern in video sequences. Instead, Kittie and Bob had to use slides from the 1970s, which were difficult to run, and the subjects they’d brought in for the original experiment with the video begun to move on as the festival left town.
Then ‘the rest of the equipment started to fail.’ Monitors and light bulbs started to go wrong, a computer cable melted. There were so many electrical faults that it became a running departmental joke that Kittie was jinxed. Bob showed her books on people whose very presence messes up experiments. Kittie was ‘trying to be cheerful’ about all this bizarre equipment failure. She called Bob, joking, after the third projector/hardrive/general systems failure: ‘One of us isn’t going to make it to the end of this,’ she told him. And then Bob died suddenly in August 2004 (see obituary in (See Fortean Times 192: pages 26-27) In the time leading up to his death, Kittie had prophetic dreams of attending Bob’s funeral. She took his death as sign that ‘I’m not meant to be doing this.’ Her performing work was taking off by then, and she decided parapsychology was something she could always come back to…
But the paranormal had come into Kittie’s life long before she chose a career in parapsychology. She had a near death experience aged 10, as a result of an allergic reaction. Another childhood experience she describes was a ‘bizarrely accurate vision of the death of Princess Diana a year before she died… A black shadow from the North West coming over Paris, the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel at high speed,’ the feeling that she should ‘watch her back.’ Kittie has also had shared dreams with people, or witnessed other peoples’ dreams as they dream them.
She grew up in East Kilbride, south of Glasgow, although she didn’t know at the time it was a UFO hotspot. The sky round her house would be full of the searchlights of helicopters chasing escapees from the mental hospital over the moors. She remembers one night watching a searchlight moving around in the sky above the woods for ten minutes, ‘then I realised there was no sound beyond the rustling of trees, I couldn’t see a craft, just the light – not a source.’
Kittie’s interest in Ufology extends to a friendship with Ufologist Nick Pope, who got in touch with her after reading her interview in a UFO magazine. Says Kittie of Nick Pope, ‘he’s a lovely gent.’
Fortunately, Kittie saw the funny side of Ufology, as evidenced by the three-minute alien abduction burlesque routine, written by Kittie but still awaiting a debut. This skit ‘burlesques’ (sends up) The X-Files with a chorus line of aliens. It’s got ‘a medical Carry On style sequence, complete with alien surgical clichés referencing what people actually report. Although, as it is a burlesque, we don’t show any of the more “intimate” horrors.’
On a more serious note, Kittie says ‘I still have a problem with electricity… I once famously crashed the whole library network at Glasgow University.’ Bob Morris saw her apparent allergic reaction to electricity, which Kittie’s business partner and fiancé James, an IT expert and world-class programmer, can confirm. Says Kitty, ‘I go through laptops at an alarming rate, I have been known to interfere with TV signals, I get headaches and rashes when vacuum cleaners and computers power up. Light bulbs rarely last around me, cameras often don’t work and I have allergic reactions to the London Underground (seriously!) – I’ve often wondered if it’s the electricity… I get dizzy, over-hot and develop that peculiar rash.’
Then there was the time she participated in an experiment in Glasgow in which electrodes were attached to her head, and they didn’t pick up any data from her at all. This is supposed to happen ‘only if you’re dead.’
BBC Scotland once engaged Kittie as a ‘psychic detective’ as part of a programme that followed young paranormal investigators working in the reputedly haunted Britannia Panopticon Music Hall at Glasgow’s Trongate. At 150 years old, the Panopticon is Britain’s oldest surviving intact music hall. It’s said that it didn’t burn down -– like all the other Glasgow music halls – as there was so much urine soaked into in the wood. Stanley Laurel debuted at the Panopticon aged 16 in 1906, and Kittie has done fundraising gigs for the venue.
The ‘proper investigators’ of Kitty’s SSPR team started with some serious archive research and then set up equipment in various parts of the Panopticon – ‘TV cameras, infra-red cameras, mini-disc digital recorders to record EVP, absolutely nothing happened.’ The BBC team suggested focusing on a mediumship demonstration from a circle of people who believed themselves to be psychic. The result was ‘wordy, incongruous to facts and rather dull actually. It wasn’t data that we could use.’
While Kittie’s team was setting up, there were – understandably given the age of the venue – ‘knocking noises from the pipes (which the BBC got excited about and filmed three times). The suggestion that it was in fact plumbing was vetoed.’ The whole investigation was a ‘non-conclusive event. Those who went in believing came out believing, those who didn’t were unchanged.’
Kittie stressed that the SSPR have many mediums among their members and on its council. SSPR mediums attended the Panopticon vigil as part of the SSPR investigation. For this investigation, ‘myself and a few colleagues were approaching from a scientific viewpoint and had designed the vigil as such. Were at loggerheads with the (other) mediums who showed little regard for the importance of protocol and ignored our requests for structure.’
After the death of Bob Morris, strange stuff continued to happen. During a photo shoot for a fetish magazine at the Erotic Museum of Hamburg, Kittie was posing with straw and porcelain Victorian theatre dummy, when a soft, masculine voice came to her in German, and the dummy’s eyes appeared to look at her. ‘No way! I’ve not enough sleep,’ Kittie told herself. She ‘didn’t tell anyone for a few hours, (thinking) it could be lack of sleep.’ Then she found that the incident coincided with the failure of the photographer’s camera, and her boyfriend said that at the same time he’d chased a light up the museum’s stairs, the same stairs which fellow fetish glamour model Morrigan Hell fell down on a shoot shortly before. ‘So many people had experiences’ of the space, Kittie found out. Photography equipment seizing up on Kittie Klaw modelling shoots is, she says, something that happens often.
For the moment, being a global burlesque glamour phenomenon pretty much precludes a return to professional parapsychology any time soon. Kittie says she remains a sceptic in the academic sense, ‘I haven’t yet formed a firm belief’ one way or another. How does Kittie’s grounding in the science of parapsychology inform how she feels about the strange things that keep happening to her? ‘Studying parapsychology keeps me rational about it. To say that I’m only going to consider certain possibilities, that’s ridiculous… I’ve always maintained my interest in the paranormal… I’m a sceptical enquirer in the academic sense, but a fascinated enquirer with a desire to be convinced.’
‘Sceptic,’ according to Kittie, is a word that has come into disrepute over the years, like ‘burlesque’.
See also www.kittieklaw.com
© Matt Salusbury 2007
Sunday, 6 January 2008
Published articles update 07 01 08
My website has finally been updated, for the first time since June (whoops!)
New additions include:
Curse of the Daleks, the forgotten Doctor Who West End stage production from 1965.
Northern Iraq gallery - pictures from my visit to Iraqi Kurdistan, Spring 2004
My report on Weird Weekend 2007 for Fortean Times is on their website now.
My interview with Queen of Burlesque and parapsychologist Kitty Klaw appeared in Fortean Times issue 232, March 2008. Here it is on one of Kitty Klaw's websites. (Updated 2013).
My Guardian Weekly feature on the “Save ESOL” campaign (July 2007) is now online
The United States 1763-2001, by John Spiller, which appears to be the standard history textbook for the final years of High School and the first year on university in that country, quotes one of my articles in BBC History from way back in 2002.
I’m down to speak on pygmy elephants at the CFZ’s Weird Weekend in August 2008. See also Nick Redfern's announcement on this.
My Time Out (London) article on the Anarchist Bookfair is now (much later) on the Time Out site.
Photographer/writer collaborations - the text to photographer Alex Masi’s photo series is now on his website at http://A Vampyre’s Tale1 click on “Text available” at the bottom left of that page.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Coming soon - Fortean film gossip
Fortean Times assure me that my 'Forum' (opinion) piece on movie gossip surrounding the 'optioning' by Universal studios of a certain Fortean book will be in the next issue, FT 229 , due out in 18 October. I seem to have made the inadvertent leap into some kind of one-off ''Hollywood Confidential' scandal-mongery. Other forthcoming FT articles of mine include the Natural History Museum's freakshow (issue after next), nipple-tassle twirling Queen of Burlesque, fetish model and parapsychologist Kittie Klaw on... er... parapsychology (in time for Christmas) and the long-awaited long feature on pygmy elephants, whenever the hell I get the time to write it. All of these will be on my website as soon as the 'First British Serial' (ie the issue they're in) has run its course, after which copyright reverts to me.
DSEi Arms Fair 2007 close up
I was surprised how easy it was to cycle up to the docks opposite the DSEi arms fair last Tuesday (11th September) - with a rucksack on - and take this picture of the DSEi delegates in the Excel Centre from across the docks, despite the Terrorism Act being in force throughout London for the event. The rubber dinghy full of RIver Police that pottered by didn't seem too bothered by me either.
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