‘Our chorus line was never going to look like the Moulin Rouge’s,” says Katherina Radeva. And everyone knows what that one looks like, don’t they? The high-kicking cancan chorus line with long legs flying up in a blur as women show off their bloomers to the sound of Offenbach’s irresistibly infectious music – a riot of frills, thrills, whoops and garters. Well, that’s certainly one version. But Radeva is talking about Bottoms, a show she has put together with co-director Alister Lownie and their company Two Destination Language. Bottoms takes the cancan as its muse, its creators having discovered that the real story of the dance phenomenon is much more interesting than the tourist-friendly cliche.
It turns out that the identikit all-female spectacle that we know so well is the opposite of how the cancan first began in the working-class dancehalls of Paris, where it was a social dance full of spontaneous improvisation – and performed primarily by men. It was only much later that it became a theatrical spectacle for the well-to-do. “What we really latched on to, which we relate to deeply, is this,” says Radeva. “Working-class makeup shit-hot dance. People go, ‘Oh, I really love that. I’ll have it.’ Then they commercialise it and almost take it all away.’”
