Canada Goes Burlesque!

Two big Canadian burlesque festivals over the next three weeks will give the lie to those who believe all Canadians are stiff and humourless with calvinist leanings from their Scottish ancestry. In fact, it was Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes (good name for a rockabilly group there) who first brought burlesque to north America in the 1860s, having developed the artform out of the Spanish burletta on the London stage - since then of course, it's grown into an international phenomenon.


Lydia Thompson

The second Montreal Burlesque Festival takes place this weekend and features an overwhelming catalogue of performers, sideshows, workshops and of course champagne cocktails. The original burlesque of the Victorian era developed a style that included a degree of bawdiness, base humour, parody, self-irony and a subversive love of the outrageous in life that is still apparent in the medium today.

In Montreal, you can expect to find old-timers such as Miss April March from the fifties boom, mixing with modern day performers such as Roxi Dlite and Renea Le Roux.


Miss April March


Roxi DLite

One week later in Toronto, we find the performers attempting to break the 12-hour record for a burlesque show as part of the Nuit Blanche festival. In a show running from 6.57pm to 7.00am Oct 2nd/3rd, the usual mix of laughter, magic, dance, demonstration and circus skills at the Gladstone Hotel will even include the Great Canadian Wolfman. That's gotta be a must-see!

"Never has a burlesque variety event of this size and length been attempted," says event organiser Chris Doyle, aka Mysterian the Mind Reader. The performers include the Rockalilly Burlesque Troupe and Glamourpuss Burlesque


Rockalilly - top row, second right, oh boy!


Glamourpuss - top row left - cute!