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Stella Kulagowski is the writer‑performer behind Louise: The Last Dance, the Fringe show that pulls Louise Weber — La Goulue herself — out from under a century of mythmaking and lets her speak, move, and breathe again. Kulagowski isn’t just interpreting Weber; she’s inhabiting her, stitching together the fragments history left behind and confronting the ways women and queer artists are still framed, consumed, and rewritten today. What emerges is a portrait that refuses nostalgia and refuses sanitisation — a raw, funny, furious reclamation of a woman who lived loudly, loved widely, and paid dearly for being unforgettable.
In this conversation, she talks about finding the real Louise beneath the legend, the power dynamics that shaped her rise and fall, and what it means to stand alone on stage and argue back on behalf of someone who never got to tell her own story.
1. Louise Weber’s life reads like a rise‑and‑fall myth — laundress to the highest‑paid entertainer in France, then back to the margins. What was the moment in your research when she stopped being a legend and became a living, breathing woman you felt compelled to inhabit?
There’s a moment in the research for a project like this where you stop reading about your subject and start feeling her. For me it was stumbling on the Lacombe footage, the documentary clip filmed not long before she died at sixty two years old. She’s old, missing teeth, dressed in rags, and then she starts to move. And something happens to me in the carriage of her arm – this small, but unmistakable elegance. You catch this smirk on her face and suddenly you’re not looking at a broken old woman, you’re looking at the most famous dancer in France, the muse. That’s the moment her legend became tangible to me. Her life is the epitome of the rags-to-riches-to-rags arc and her story sounds so unbelievable, but watching her move, decades past her prime, in the mud outside her caravan, made it raw in a way no photograph or painting quite had. She wasn’t performing nostalgia for the camera, film was so new there wasn’t any expectation of how to even perform for film. She was just being, deep in her bones, exactly who she’d always been. That’s the woman I knew I could feel in my own body on stage.
2. The show begins in 1928, with Louise living in La Zone — the part of Paris where the city hid what it didn’t want to see. What drew you to that late‑life vantage point rather than the glittering Moulin Rouge years? What does starting at the end allow you to reveal?
From the moment I saw that Lacombe footage, I knew the show had to bookend there. It felt like the only place to start and end. So much of what I’m telling in this piece is about how Louise was documented endlessly by other people and never once recognized for her own talent, her own creation, except as a footnote, a subject for men to paint and photograph and write about, right up to the last months of her life. There’s something almost unbearably poetic about that: being filmed to the very end and still never truly seen. Starting there, in Montmartre, blocks away from the Moulin Rouge where she was once the biggest star in France and was now selling peanuts to get by, gives the whole piece a kind of sad “I bet you’re wondering how I got here” jumping off point. And when we go all the way back and end up there again, I think it feels so satisfying.
3. Louise was painted by Renoir, immortalised by Toulouse‑Lautrec, photographed, mythologised, and endlessly consumed — yet her own voice was never recorded. How do you approach giving voice to someone history refused to hear?
She wasn’t entirely silent, that’s the incredible thing. There are fragments: an interview here, a remembered line there, diary pages, moments where her own words slipped through the cracks of everyone else’s reporting. And her wit and bite were epic, even by today’s standards. She really did yell out to the Prince of Wales in the middle of the Moulin Rouge “Hey Wales, you buying the champagne or are you just here waiting for your mother?” I’m obsessed. I built the show out from those fragments like scaffolding. Then of course, so much of her record was made into scandal and exaggeration, so we don’t always know what is real. So, of course I made artistic (and editing) choices, but they’re never careless ones. Everything I present in the show is built on extensive research into who she was, what she survived, how she moved through the world. I’m not inventing someone, I’m standing in for someone I have come to care for deeply, using her own documented fragments as my compass.
4. Your work blends projection, archival media, dance, and direct address. When you’re reconstructing a life that’s been fragmented by other people’s gazes, how do you decide what belongs to Louise and what belongs to the world that used her?
The projection is meant to do the work of anchoring us in time and place, using all the actual documented paintings, photographs, and posters people might already half-recognize. Those images do the work of a thousand words, or ten thousand dollars of set design (!), in about two seconds. That’s evidence of this wild life lived and what the world saw and made of her.
The sound design is where the emotional weight lives. We hear the music she remembers in her own head, propelling her dance. And we hear the men in her life, Renoir, Zidler, Lacombe, as disembodied voices, cutting in, directing her, deciding things about her. That disembodiment is deliberate, it’s their force and influence without a face or body, just power acting on her from outside.
But you’ll notice the important women in her life, (her sister, her lover) are never disembodied voices. They live in her own body, in memory, because they were never outside her the way the men were. They’re not haunting her from a projection or a speaker. They’re still with her, held close, because that’s where love lives when everything else about you has been documented, torn apart for profit or taken away.
5. La Goulue’s stage persona was famously audacious — high kicks, hat‑flicking, drinking from patrons’ glasses (where it is said she derived her name, ‘The Gluttion’ from), teasing the crowd. How much of that bravado do you bring into the show, and how much do you strip away to reveal the person underneath?
I lean hard into exactly these things. Her bravado is real and one of the most documented, factual things about her. And she earned every ounce of it. What I try to strip away is the assumption that bravado and fear can’t exist at the same time. I don’t play her struggle as a betrayal of her audacity, I play them as the same muscle flexed in opposite directions. She can flick a duke’s hat off his head with her high kick and simultaneously be quietly terrified that someone younger and prettier is already lined up to replace her. Both things are true in the show, moments apart. I don’t need to dial down the swagger to find the person underneath, the swagger is just one layer of a truly complicated woman. The true challenge is trying to show all that in a sharp 50 minutes!
6. Louise loved women and men and champagne and life with equal ferocity. Do you see her as a figure of queer joy, queer tragedy, or something more complicated — a woman whose appetites were both her liberation and her undoing?
Honestly, it’s complicated, and I’m still sitting with that complication rather than resolving it. She hid her relationships with women, but looking at it through a contemporary lens, that wasn’t shame in the way we’d think of it now, it was survival. Her income depended on men. Her safety depended on being legible to them as available. Hiding her female lovers wasn’t erasure imposed from outside, it was a choice she made to protect the very fame and money that kept her alive.
But other people absolutely wanted to profit off her queerness when it suited them; Zidler putting that painting of her and Marie up, Toulouse capturing what she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say out loud. She never got to control that either. She’d have been the one left holding the scandal if it went wrong, not them.
A lot of my work explores queer joy, taking classic texts and stories and placing them in queer context. But this one is harder, because it’s not fiction and it doesn’t resolve that way. I don’t think this is a story of queer joy. I think it’s a story of a woman who loved fiercely and still had to calculate, every single day, what that love might cost her. I’m not sure there’s a tidy ending here for her and Marie, and I’m not going to manufacture one just because it would feel better to tell.
7. You’ve had three sold‑out Toronto Fringe productions and a background in burlesque, dance, and visual art. Where does Louise: The Last Dance sit within your artistic evolution? Does it feel like a culmination, a departure, or a new beginning?
This feels like a new chapter, more than a culmination or departure. Almost everything I’ve made before this has been big ensemble work, spectacle, dance, song, burlesque, a whole cast of talented people to lean on and hide inside. This is the first time it’s just me, alone, on stage, for fifty minutes. It’s terrifying! There’s nowhere to hide when it’s just me, telling my little story, no ‘somebody else’s striptease number’ to carry the room while I catch my breath.
But stripping away (ha!) all those crutches has made me a stronger, more confident creator than any of the bigger shows did. When you can’t rely on spectacle, you have to trust the writing, the performance, the genuine meaningfulness of the story. You have to trust yourself. I don’t think I could have made this show five years ago. I needed everything I learned building those ensemble pieces just to have the nerve to stand up here alone.
8. Louise’s story raises a sharp question: who gets to tell their own story, and who gets rewritten by others? In making this piece, did you find parallels between Louise’s era and the way women and queer artists are framed today?
Oh, absolutely, one hundred percent, this piece is meant to evoke how we continue to treat women artists. The media has never stopped loving setting women up just to tear them down. Women artists get cast as bitchy, crazy, difficult, emotional wrecks, while their male counterparts get called artistic geniuses for the exact same behavior. The way we still erase women’s achievements is shameful, and it’s not new. Louise was possibly the first in an endless line of women lambasted publicly to the delight and profit of mostly men. There’s actually a huge nod to this in the show, but I don’t want to spoil it. Is it cheesy to say you’ll have to come see it for that reveal?
9. The Moulin Rouge era is often romanticised — all colour, spectacle, and bohemian glamour. What truths about that world surprised you most when you dug beneath the posters and the mythmaking?
I think how precarious it all was, even at the very top. The “muse” relationship with those painters was far more transactional than the romantic legend suggests. A modeling session with Renoir’s circle paid ten to twenty-five francs, and a laundress at the time made roughly two francs a day. So a single afternoon sitting still, often nude, could be worth a week or more of scrubbing other people’s linens. The men got the immortality and she got a fraction of what her image was actually worth.
Even at her peak, none of it was stable. She was attacked by wolves and lions during her menagerie years and entered into marriages of convenience and safety. The whole ‘Belle Epoque’ era gets remembered as color and champagne, but underneath it was this woman – the most famous of the era – calculating constantly, how much of her body and safety she could afford to risk for the next franc.
10. Finally, if Louise Weber could step into Ivy Studio during your Fringe run and watch the show, what do you hope she’d recognise in your performance — and what do you hope she’d forgive?
Oh gosh, I’d like to think we’d go out afterward and share a cheap bottle of wine and absolutely cackle at how wrong I got it! But really, I hope with all my heart, that she’d love the gumption and the spirit of it all. I hope she’d recognise the refusal to make her sanitized and palatable. I didn’t sand down the drinking, the audacity, the mess, the contradictions, because I think she’d have hated a version of herself that was too easy to like. I hope she’d see a woman finally allowed to argue back.
As for forgiveness, there are places where I fully imagine her interior life: what she felt in a given moment, what she might have said to her lovers in private and what they said to her. I hope she’d forgive me those inventions, because I made every one of them in service of being truthful to her, never at her expense.This is a love letter to, and about, a complicated, messy woman. Not a scandalous headline. Not a poster in a giftshop. Just Louise.
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