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Stella Kulagowski’s performance allows the extraordinary life of La Goulue to emerge from behind the familiar images of fin-de-siècle Paris. We all think we know the Moulin Rouge: the skirts, the high kicks, the posters, the absinthe-soaked mythology of Montmartre. Stella goes looking for the woman inside that mythology.
La Goulue was actually Louise Weber, born in 1866 and destined to become perhaps the most famous cancan dancer of her age. Her nickname — roughly, “The Glutton” — apparently came from her habit of finishing off customers’ drinks as she moved around the cabarets. By the early 1890s she was one of the great attractions of the Moulin Rouge, dancing with Valentin le Désossé and developing a reputation not merely for physical exuberance but for a wonderfully irreverent attitude towards respectability.
Stella makes good use of the art of the period to draw us into that world. Most important is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, for whom La Goulue became an unforgettable subject. His great 1891 poster Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, with Valentin looming in the foreground and La Goulue caught in movement behind him, did more than advertise a nightclub act. It helped make Lautrec famous while turning La Goulue herself into an image recognised across Paris.
That relationship between performer and artist gives the show another dimension. We are watching Stella perform a woman who was herself performing for an audience, while at the same time seeing how artists turned that woman into an image, even a commodity. Celebrity culture is hardly a modern invention. La Goulue understood publicity, provocation and the value of being talked about long before Instagram arrived.
Then there are the stories surrounding the famous men who entered her orbit. One of the best concerns the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. According to Moulin Rouge legend, La Goulue spotted him in the audience while performing and, rather than showing the deference normally expected towards royalty, called out to him to buy the champagne. Whether every detail has survived the retelling intact almost ceases to matter: the story has endured because it fits the personality so perfectly.
Her connections went further. Accounts of her life link her romantically with the future Edward VII, the Egyptian prince Chérif Amourad Yazi and the Russian Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich. La Goulue moved through a peculiar world in which aristocrats, artists, dancers, bohemians and wealthy pleasure-seekers could all find themselves under the same roof.
La Goulue’s romantic life was far broader than the legends about princes and grand dukes suggest. Away from the cabaret spotlight, she also formed relationships with women — connections that offered her a degree of emotional stability and companionship often missing from the chaotic world of Montmartre. These relationships underline an important truth about Louise Weber: she lived on her own terms, choosing affection and loyalty wherever she found them, long before such choices were socially acceptable. In a life defined by performance, provocation and reinvention, her relationships with women reveal a quieter, more intimate side of a woman determined to claim her freedom in every part of her life.
Stella brings these strands together rather than simply giving us a succession of anecdotes. The projected or reproduced artworks are particularly effective because they remind us that La Goulue survives in two forms: as a real woman with an extraordinary life and as the stylised creature handed down to us by the artists of Montmartre.
That distinction matters. It would have been very easy to turn the whole thing into an exercise in Belle Époque nostalgia — all feathers, stockings and naughty Parisian fun. Instead, there is something more interesting going on. Behind Toulouse-Lautrec’s instantly recognisable figure was a working performer who made herself famous in a world in which women had relatively few routes to independence and notoriety on their own terms.
Stella clearly relishes the theatricality of the material, but she also has an eye for its history. Art, biography and performance overlap until we begin to understand why La Goulue became such a compelling figure. She wasn’t simply someone who happened to dance at the Moulin Rouge. For a time she was the Moulin Rouge: provocative, exuberant, outrageous and impossible to ignore.
The result is a colourful trip into Montmartre, certainly, but also something more substantial — an attempt to reclaim the living, difficult and gloriously unruly woman from the famous pictures that eventually threatened to overshadow her.
Reviewed by Pat Harrington
Read an interview with Stella here
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