17-18-19 mars 2010, 20h

Neon Nightz

En anglais - pour le Festival Edgy Women - www.edgywomen.ca
Création et performance : Sasha Van Bon Bon et Kitty Neptune

En plein coeur de l’hiver glacé montréalais, où peuvent bien s’abriter les âmes pour y trouver du réconfort, des aveux et le salut? Comme le révèlent les Scandelles (Sasha Van Bon Bon et Kitty Neptune), les clubs de strip-tease de Montréal dans les années 90 étaient tout aussi en demande que ces autres lieux sacrés offrant aussi un refuge. Depuis l’icône de la danseuse-vedette jusqu’à la danse sur table dans les confessionnaux, Neon Nightz explore le côté humain de l’univers de la danse exotique et dévoile des révélations surprenantes.

Les Scandelles (Kitty Neptune et Sasha Van Bon Bon) ont rassemblé une liste impressionnante de collaborateurs et développé un corpus prolifique de création en moins d’une décennie. De numéros de burlesque environnemental jusqu’aux productions théâtrales à grands déploiements, les Scandelles ont créé un repertoire de spectacles provocants et follement divertissants dont Under the Mink, Who’s Your Dada?, Les Demimondes et Give A Piece of Ass a Chance (un court métrage de pornographie artistique créer en collaboration avec Bruce LaBruce). Le travail des Scandelles a été vu autant dans des clubs de danseuses que dans des festivals internationaux de film. La danseuse et chorégraphe Kitty Neptune et l’éditorialiste publiée à l’échelle nationale Sasha Van Bon Bon ont participé en tant que performeures et co-créatrices à ArtHouse Cabaret (gagnant d’un prix Dora en 2007)

review by Sara Fauteux

Edgy Women festival’s mission is to provide a forum for all kinds of artists in a very diverse program of artistic performance in a feminine perspective. Presented by Studio 303, this festival supports innovating creative process for artists from all disciplines. In fact, Edgy Women is in constant research and exploration in order to push back the traditional forms of arts of stage and to question their purpose.  It aspires to be both “experimental AND entertaining” and certainly achieves this objective with its opening piece, Neon Nightz.

The show presents itself as a burlesque cabaret where a strip dancer confides to the public the unrevealed faces of her job. She tells about her clients, from a lovely couple looking for a little spicing up of their sexual life, a masochist businessman who enjoys to be dominated by strippers lonely, to a virgin man searching for tenderness. We also learn about the dynamic within the strip club, amongst the dancers, their motivations, the way they see strip dancing. 

The Scandelles, a duet of feminine artists who performed and created the show, are accompanied on stage by Countess Christsmasher, who assures very effective music transitions and challenges the actresses with hilarious comments. While Sacha Van Bon delivers her monologues, inspired from autobiographical elements, Kitty Neptune strip dances to illustrate the anecdotes of her partner. Both of them appear as real strip dancers, displaying a distant but provocative attitude and mastering the techniques of pole dancing.   

This is where this burlesque cabaret passes from entertaining to somewhat fascinating. Along with a strong and complex narrative line, the show actually takes the form of a strip show. The actresses are really getting naked, interacting with the public as they would with customers in a strip club. At some point, the strange feeling of actually assisting to a dance in a strip club crosses our minds and we start to understand how this pushes back the limits of performance.

Through Edgy Women festival, Neon Nightz offers an intelligent reflection on the form and artistic possibilities of sexual performance. It also brings up an informative perspective on sex work, what it can provide, its limits and how strangely those same parameters can be applied to our relation with many other things such as religion and intimacy.

19-03-2010