Backstage

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.'

Ramsey chimes in: 'I thought they were going to hire skinny French actresses who would go to school and learn how to do burlesque - I really did.'

That's probably what Hollywood would have done - as proven by the recently released musical film Burlesque, which stars Christina Aguilera and Kristen Bell as rival performers in a nightclub - but On Tour is hardly an unfettered celebration of artifice and glamour. Most of the film's screen time is dedicated to the actors whiling away their downtime, as they travel on trains, mill about in non-descript hotel lobbies, go sightseeing or rehearse in empty halls.

This fascination with the transitory nature of touring stems from Amalric's interest in The Other Side of Music-Hall, a 1913 text in which French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette chronicles her own observations of what happened behind the scenes at performances she participated in as a pantomime performer in the 1910s. The director then embellished that concept with ideas rooted in his exchanges with Colclasure, Ramsey and their friends, as they told him about their likes and dislikes as artists perennially on the road.

'It's funny to see how we had these regular conversations and he put these little things I told him into the film,' says Colclasure. 'An example is how I told him that I pretty much wear make-up every day because I hate my freckles and I don't ever want anyone to see me without make-up. And that's why he got this idea of [Amalric's on-screen character Joachim Zand] stopping me and tearing off my eyelashes.'

That's actually one of On Tour's most highly charged scenes, as it heralds the coming together of these two lonely souls: Joachim, a failed television producer and useless father trying to regain his footing in France with his burlesque show, is seen struggling desperately for redemption, while the screen version of Mimi is furious about Joachim's ineptness but also is drawn by the man's tortured psyche.

On Tour, today, 9.50pm, Palace IFC; Dec 9, 7.40pm, Broadway Cinematheque