Building Les créatures du tease

We don't usually talk much about the process. But this show has been different from the start, so we wanted to let you in on some of it.

A full production is a different animal ( see what we did there lol).

Most nights, you know what to expect from us: a line up, a run of acts, a night that moves fast and its fun its entertaining but its sometimes a mixed bag. Les Créatures du Tease is not that. It's one continuous production, with its own arc, its own world, and a cast who are building something together rather while still performing their acts separately. That changes everything about how we rehearse, how we build, and what we ask of the people involved.

A line up asks a performer to bring their best act, A full production asks something bigger: a throughline, a character that has to hold across the whole night, transitions that carry weight instead of just filling space. It's a different kind of work, and it's been a genuinely different kind of process to put together.

The physical world of Les Creatures du Tease

We wanted to create a world that shifted you from the glamour into something that felt outlandish and like the pantomime and parody that burlesque can be.

Every piece on that stage has been made specifically for this production and direct from Domino’s brain. It's slow work, and it's the kind of work that doesn't show up in a ticket price but absolutely shows up on stage.

This idea had been core from the start and our promo photo shoot, where on the day Domino whipped up some panto grass out of a cardboard box. From years of teaching and talking about how burlesque is pantomime this was the show to bring that to life. This idea has been replicated into large scale set pieces but keeping the same idea.

The original grass in studio at House of Lane. Thanks to some poster paint, an old box from a desk and some determination.

The new pieces have been made by our props team out of MDF and a hell of a lot of paint. The flats come in many sizes and have accompanying foot lights for the show.

This has been the labour of love over the last 2 months to create, and yes they are getting rhinestones on them as well.
We really wanted to be able to create a world that was distinctly outside by wasnt utilising the fake grass or plants due to storage and longevity. Also the number we would need for such a large space was outside what we want to store.

Grass design on MDF

Props Master Danica hard at work

Our storage room currently

You will have to wait to see it on stage for the finished rhinestone version

How do you cast when so many people have incredible animal acts?

Les Créatures du Tease is a wild, surreal, and seductively untamed cabaret burlesque adventure. Guided by our curious explorer-MC, you'll travel through a strange land filled with creatures.

Loosely inspired by The Island of Dr Moreau, the show taps into our obsession with animal imagery in performance and the primal instincts lurking beneath our polished exteriors. We're bringing together a core cast award-winning artists and giving them total freedom to bring out their absolute weirdest acts, giving their strange, experimental side just as much spotlight as those classic, jaw-dropping glamour numbers.

We normally space out these animalistic numbers within a lineup show, what would happen if we put them all together. But bigger questions arised, why would they be together? How does this not just feel like another show? And with so many wonderful acts out there how do you narrow it down?

After development sessions it was decided that the best way to group the animals was to create the world, and if we have a world that is these creatures in their ‘ natural habitat’ the idea of animals and human intervention cant exist. This is where out host development came in and ensuring that the central focus was on the animals retaining power and ownership. This couldn't be a zoo and it couldn't be something that was encroaching on ownership. The animals must just exist and our host guides the audience in this observation.

We started brainstorming who was out there and realised that the animals could settle into archetypes and this allowed us to create a narrative structure for our host.

Draft brainstorming

The idea of booking a large number of award winning artists to come and play in this space was also important, we want to showcase high quality burlesque in its weird wonderful glory.

Theres so many people we wanted to book but it was a clash with availability or the archetypes doubled up but this show is created to evolve and grow. And that it will.

Our first season starts on 29 September and runs for 5 nights.

Featuring:

Domino de Jour, Egson Ham, Ruby Slippers, Imogen Kelly, Gia Saphique, Sham, Winter Greene, Jet Stir and more, hosted by Pip Stachio its ready to get wild.

So the question remains , are you ready to surrender to the strange and let the creatures in.?