Stage Door News
Stage Door News
“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think”.
The American author Dorothy Parker made this cutting remark almost 100 years ago when she was playing a game called I Can Give You a Sentence with her Vicious Circle cronies. She was asked to make a sentence with the word “horticulture”.
As clever as it is, it betrays a universal contempt for sex workers that time and again has proven fatal: violence against prostitutes as well as work-related mortality are higher than any other group of women ever studied. In Canada, where the fate of decriminalized sex work has been before the courts for two years, sex workers continue to operate under laws that state it is legal to be a prostitute, yet simultaneously make it impossible to work under any reasonably safe conditions. Around the world, sex workers toil in legal limbo, risking arrest, murder, extortion and social expunction simply for using their own bodies to generate income.
Dorothy Parker’s remark is also completely false. Looking at arts and media throughout time you will see that whores don’t need to be led to culture. Culture pursues whores.
Through a multidisciplinary lens of dance, film, song, movement and monologue Les Demimondes looks at how fine arts, music, film, photography and the media have profited off the shabby mystique of the whore while whores themselves remain marginalized and criminalized. These representations often further diminish the status of sex workers, painting unrealistic portraits or offering only the most squalid perspectives.
Hosted by Prostitution herself, a Zelig-like character who leads us through famous depictions of prostitutes in the arts and media, Les Demimondes seeks restitution for the maligned sex worker. Who was Roxanne and why should she turn off her red light? What did Cicciolina think about Jeff Koons making millions off her notoriety while the same images of her in sex magazines sold for significantly less and to far less acclaim? And who were all those anonymous women betrayed and shamed by the scandal magazines of the fifties? What is Heidi Fleiss up to now that she doesn’t have the media in a frenzy? What does Alphonsine Plessis think of how she was portrayed in The Lady of the Camellias and La Traviata?
Prostitution is an archetypal trickster character, candid but prone to exaggeration, sly and sentimental, as wicked and as witty as can be. She engages her pantheon of notorious guests with salaciousness and compassion—she has been there, done that and has the notch in her bedpost to prove it. Still, for all her posturing, she is a sensitive soul who wonders, in a play-on-words of Parker’s play-on-words, why “whores have been given a sentence for so long.”
For over a decade, The Scandelles have been Toronto’ premier cabaret theatre company, producing mid- to large-scale multidisciplinary shows that have delighted, aroused and confounded audiences and critics alike. Unapologetically sexual and ruthlessly entertaining, The Scandelles have been on the vanguard of contemporary cabaret since 2000, with a string of sold out and critically acclaimed shows in Toronto and Montreal. This year, they have chosen to bid adieu to their company and begin anew as Operation Snatch.
“The name change reflects our desire to continue on in the tradition of the politically mindful work we have been pursuing for 7 years,” says artistic co-director, Alexandra Tigchelaar (formerly known by her stage name Sasha Van Bon Bon). “Though Operation Snatch might have an equally salacious ring to it, it reflects our longstanding socially conscious mandate. Operation Snatch was an operative initiated by the Canadian government against the Doukhobors in the 1950s. They took their children away and placed them in residential schools because the Doukhobors refused to school them with “traditionally” Canadian methods and values.”
Adds Catherine Nimmo (formerly known as Kitty Neptune) “The Doukhobors protested this injustice completely naked. We too believe in using our bodies to raise consciousness and demonstrate strength though physical vulnerability and vulnerability through emotional strength. And of course, the double entendre makes dealing with financial institutions and potential investors all the more entertaining.”
Les Demimondes marks The Scandelles first performance as Operation Snatch.
Les Demimondes
Starring
Alexandra Tigchelaar (Sasha Van Bon Bon)
Catherine Nimmo (Kitty Neptune)
Jesse Dell
Andrya Duff
March 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 2012
Showtime: 8pm all nights, with a Sunday matinee at 3pm
20$, matinee 15$
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
12 Alexander Street St
Tickets may be purchased at the door or by calling the Buddies box office at 416-975-8555
2012-02-06
Toronto: Operation Snatch presents Les Demimondes March 2-4