As burlesque artists who have spent the past decade touring US and European venues big and small, Miranda Colclasure and Suzanne Ramsey hardly look the type to be fazed by anything. But they admit they were slightly apprehensive before their half-hour performance in Hong Kong two weeks ago.
'I love being on stage, and I'm a big ham, but for the first time I was nervous,' says Ramsey, a singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name of Kitten on the Keys. 'What if they don't understand me?'
Colclasure agrees. 'This is a whole new territory for us - I was thinking, 'Are you going to throw lettuce on our heads?'' says the dancer, known on stage as Mimi Le Meaux. 'At one point during the performance,' Ramsey says, laughing, 'it just hit me that, oh my goodness, we're showing our boobies at City Hall - it seems a bit scandalous!'
You've read it right: it was at the Leisure and Cultural Services Department's premier island-side venue - more commonly known for hosting classical music, Chinese opera and mainstream theatre performances - where Colclasure did her strip-tease routine and Ramsey strutted and sang innuendo-heavy numbers such as My Girl's Pussy. The event marked the screening of On Tour, the opening film of this year's French Cinepanorama in which the pair - alongside their real-life regular stage collaborators - play performers travelling around second-fiddle French cities under the aegis of a hard-up and helpless manager (Mathieu Amalric, who also co-wrote and directed the film).
Their warmly received appearance at City Hall was just one of many firsts Colclasure and Ramsey attained this year. With their stellar turns in On Tour, they have attained exposure well beyond their usual audience base, and their visit to Hong Kong was the latest of many high-profile journeys undertaken for the sake of the film, with the most prominent being their trip to this year's Cannes Film Festival, where Amalric's film made its bow and subsequently won the French actor-filmmaker a best director award.
'When he won that award he called us on stage to be with him,' says Ramsey. 'That's very generous of him - we let him into our world of burlesque, and he let us into his world of film. It's been a nice thing for both parties involved.'
Colclasure and Ramsey say they were impressed by Amalric's dedication to the film and also his respect for their art form. 'We performed in Paris in 2005 and he had read an article in a newspaper but had missed the show,' says Colclasure. 'We came back to Nantes [in western France] for three months in 2007, and he found out and came for two or three nights. He liked what he saw and continued to do research on new burlesque artists. He came up with the core of the five of us [who performed regularly together as a group] and brought in a new person.'