Emma Carpenter, who lives near Bury St Edmunds, launches Stowmarket burlesque classes a year after attending her first session

“If you walk through that door, I will promise you you are going to leave feeling better about your body.”

This is the message from Emma Carpenter, 43, who lives near Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, for those who are considering taking up burlesque.

For her, burlesque has been ‘life-changing’ – and she is now running her own classes in Stowmarket to help others feel sexy, empowered and happy in their ‘now body’.

Emma is ‘still dancing’ despite recently having had treatment for cervical cancer and currently awaiting an operation as, even on the days she feels like she cannot, ‘burlesque keeps me motivated and pushing forwards’.

It was after having her third child, daughter Emmie, who is nearly three, that she embarked on her burlesque journey – and has ‘hit the ground running’.

Just three months after attending her first workshop, with Moon Blossom Belles, in Bury, last August, she was in her first show.

And earlier this year she launched her own classes, Flame Fatales Burlesque Workshops, which take place at Stowmarket Community Centre and are proving popular (she is hoping to expand in the future).

Emma, whose burlesque stage name and alter ego is Tempest Blaze, is also getting noticed on the competition circuit, having reached the semi-finals of the Seren Yn Codi/Rising Star competition in North Wales, and she has also been selected for the Burlesque Idol August heats, in London.

Looking back on the start of her burlesque journey, she said: “I was at a point in time when I was feeling quite rubbish about myself.

“I had just had Emmie and so my body was feeling very much not mine and I had come from quite a strong dance background, but I knew I needed something different that was going to be flexible, that I could fit in around mumming and that didn’t have the constraints of typical dance and stereotypically what you needed to look like.

“We have this societal expectation dancers should look a certain way and what I liked about burlesque was that it challenged that norm.”

Emma said what she really loved about burlesque was that it was ‘very inclusive’ – it’s for all body shapes, sizes, genders, sexualities.

“Burlesque for me as a movement is very encompassing across the board and you are never turned away with a ‘no’,” she said.

She describes it as very diverse - ‘it’s what you as an individual make it’. She says it is theatrical, it does involve some innuendo and, contrary to some misconceptions, it does not necessarily involve striptease.

She added: “Burlesque is about challenging the things that are expected of you in your day to day life and tearing them up and saying ‘actually, this is what I’m about at this moment’.”

At a time when, after having Emmie, it had been ‘too terrifying to walk into a gym’ burlesque was a way for her to love the body she has now.

“It was massively life-changing for me. I had sort of like come home and found a group of people that just embraced me [with Moon Blossom Belles],” she said. “It has made me happy.”

To those considering giving it a go, she said: “There’s a community of people there who are going to help you love how you look now and they will help you make the most of how you look now.

“All you have to do is walk through the door – that’s the hardest bit.”

For more information find Flame Fatales Burlesque on Facebook.

Tempest Blaze is performing at Stowmarket Carnival next month alongside local troupes Moon Blossom Belles and Sweet Treats, from Diss, and is also performing at Old Skool Tease, at the Constitutional Club, in Bury, on July 6.