Le Crazy Horse Dancers
Since 1951, the famed Le Crazy Horse dancers have been dazzling audiences from stages in Paris and around the globe with their impressive dance numbers and scant clothing. This fall, the girls take over APA Theatre for a 17-show run, and so they sat down with Sean Hebert to tell Hongkongers exactly what they should expect from the performances.
HK Magazine: Le Crazy Horse is an established name in Paris with a long history, but abroad, many people might think “French cabaret” and immediately think of Moulin Rouge. Are the two similar?
Yufa Yemala: They’re totally different. The Moulin Rouge is an old, traditional French show with the can-can, the big feathers, and with both girls and guys on stage. Ours is nothing like that. It’s small, intimate, features only girls, and our costumes are hardly anything because our lighting dresses us.
Taina de Bermudes: Crazy Horse is really about the fine detail—the soles of your shoes, the tips of your fingers, the precise make-up. In Moulin Rouge, they give you everything all the time, with a million people on stage wearing the biggest, best, most sparkly things they can find.
Daizy Blu: We are not just parts of a group at Crazy Horse, because we each have our own personalities, and the audience needs to read that on the bodies of the girls and how we act. We are each unique.
HK: Tell me about being nude on stage in front of an audience. Was that a challenge when you first started?
TB: It’s more of a challenge from a technical point of view: getting the clothes off in the right time with the music, and getting your character across. In terms of being naked, it’s not really a problem because we feel dressed by the lights. When you see the show, you’ll see that even when we are nude, the audience doesn’t really know what they’re seeing. It’s always kind of an illusion. For example, at the end of the striptease number, the whole stage is dark but there is one red light that comes down the middle of the body like a flickering flame, if you can imagine. You can’t really tell what you’re seeing.
Loa Vahina: It’s sensual, not sexual. When you start, you think of everything but nudity—the wigs, the shoes, the make-up, the choreography.
HK: Does it help to have stage names?
TB: Definitely. It’s like being another person or character, and you can step into that role when you go on stage. We use them religiously: a lot of us don’t even know each other’s real names.
HK: Where do your stage names come from?
TB: We are given a stage name just before we go on stage for the very first time at Crazy Horse. During the rehearsal process, they see what kind of person you are and what your personality is like, and so the management decides on a name for you and it stays for your whole Crazy Horse career. It’s like a baptism, really.
HK: What sort of experience or training does one need in dance to be in Le Crazy Horse?
TB: Everyone at Crazy Horse is classically trained, so I did that. Afterwards, I did three years of professional training in dance and musical theater, which encompasses a number of styles of dance and also singing and acting. It wasn’t until age 18 or 19 that I saw some cabaret shows, and that inspired me to try it.
DB: I originally wanted to be a ballet dancer. I studied dance in an academy—jazz, contemporary, classical. Until I was 22, I studied dance in a junior company, and then I started to work in cabaret. There’s many roads you can take to get to Crazy Horse.
HK: How has being a Crazy Horse dancer changed your life?
LV: Your self-esteem as a woman is lifted because of what they teach you.
TB: Definitely. You go through a transformation when you start at Crazy Horse. Often, it’s from a girl to a woman. You find something in yourself, and the show managers help you to find that something and they work with it. Everyone’s different, obviously, but I personally felt a change in maturity. In French they say “assumer”—to accept yourself, to have the confidence in yourself, and to be sure of who you are. That’s what we bring to the stage.