Created and performed by Sasha Van Bon Bon and Kitty Neptune. Directed by David Oiye. To Oct 10. Wed-Sat 8:30pm. $15-$29. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander. 416-975-8555.
artsexy.ca.
“Oppression is the mother of invention, and a strip club is this action made flesh.” So declares the incomparable Sasha Van Bon Bon, who witnessed this process firsthand while swinging from the poles of Montreal’s finest and grimiest gentlemen’s establishments throughout the 1990s. Neon Nightz revisits some of the individuals she encountered during her time in the g-string army – a Dolly Parton-esque “feature dancer,” a long-married couple toeing the uncharted corners of their sexuality, a grade-school math teacher seeking some x to soothe his y – who worshipped at the neon altar in various states of suppression and re-invention. For Sasha herself, this idea of creation via stripping comes to its full maturity with Neon Nightz.
The show marks the latest collaboration between Sasha and Kitty Neptune, co-creators of Toronto “conceptual cabaret” group The Scandelles. A series of personal monologues punctuated by pole-dance routines, the show implies an unusual dialogue between the strip club and the theatre. Plucked from its smoke-and-whiskey context, the act of divestment is no longer a masturbation aid, but a work of art. And although stripping could be seen as the antithesis to burlesque (where the latter titillates through humour and nuanced sexuality, stripping lays it utterly and simplistically bare), Sasha and Kitty manipulate burlesque’s tricks of exaggeration and parody to portray the stripper as both master of performance and, within her own circumstances, saintly. It’s a point of view rarely explored with such artistry.
Set designer Andy Moro has reconstructed a Montreal strip club down to its skivvies, and it’s the details that make his design. While the two towering metal poles are impressive, the Mercedes Lee candles (the first big-name stripper Sasha encountered) adorning each table are what make you feel like you’re there. This sense of being both in a strip joint and a theatre smartly enforces our re-imagining of a stripper’s equivocal role.
And hey, a stripper can’t dance without the tunes to back her up. Pre-show, songs by the Backstreet Boys and Marcy Playground get you into a cheesy '90s frame of mind. During the action, Countess Christsmasher, dressed in a nun’s habit, does her own fabulous Sister Act, singing the lyrics to everything from Leonard Cohen’s “Dance You to the End of Love” to “The Macarena.” It's all very nostalgic — oh, and fucking awesome.
In her shiny black leggings and spiked dominatrix heels, Sasha alternates between bombshell and vulnerable as she mines the varied texture of her past. Kitty, meanwhile, is sensational and show-stealing as she monkeys her way to the top of the pole. Although the monologue-dance-monologue structure is a little repetitive and a few moments felt rushed, Sasha and Kitty are a corrosive duo, and the love injected into their performances is palpable and utterly riveting. Neon Nightz is at once a smouldering ode to the power of stripping and a fascinating exploration of its limitations.