On one of our first dates, JR and I drove into New York to hear some jazz. It was a frigid mid-winter night and we had a bit of a long walk from the parking lot to the jazz club. Wrapped up in the haze of our new love (and without the benefit of cell phones or GPS which had not yet been invented) we got turned around and discovered we had gone several blocks in the wrong direction. We came to a store whose display window featured knick knacks of no particular theme, but its windows were nice and steamy so we decided to go in and warm up. Once inside, JR pronounced it a nostalgia store. While he browsed in front, I stepped through a curtain into a bigger back room that was a veritable wonderland of sex toys. Never having been in such a shop, I was busily perusing the merchandise (mostly trying to figure out what it was) when JR entered. He took one look around, turned red as a beet and announced: "Let's get out of here. This is not a nostalgia shop!"
I was reminded of this story on a recent walk on the nearby Boulevard de Clichy, which runs through the heart of the Pigalle district of Paris. Like most big cities, Paris is full of speciality shop neighborhoods. Not far from our apartment, for example, is a street of left-handed guitar stores. Pigalle's specialty is sex shops which take up several blocks of the wide, tree-lined boulevard. Most are small, with the exception of The Sexodrome, a vast pleasure supermarket that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The street, named for the village of the same name to the northwest of Paris, was originally the road that connected the Roman city of Lutetia (as Paris was then known) to the sea. The area dubbed "Pig Alley" by Allied soldiers in World War II, is actually named after the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle.
The neighborhood has had a reputation for easy living since at least the 1700s with the birth of the "folies," country homes surrounded by large gardens. Although many of these country homes were just that, others were libertine pleasure palaces where everyone from the king to rich businessmen would be gather for anything-goes weekends. Later, famous painters, including Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso all lived on the street. The 1800s saw the opening of famous themed cabarets such as the side by side Cabarets of Heaven (Le Ciel) and Hell (L'Enfer) and the nearby Cabaret of Nothingness (Cabaret du Néant).
Today, the Boulevard de Clichy is a busy, bustling thoroughfare. Every day, thousands of tourists cross the street to begin their trek up the hill to Montmartre. It's when darkness falls that the street becomes a carnival of light. Presiding over it all is the Moulin Rouge, with its signature red windmill. Celebrated in numerous Toulouse-Lautrec posters, the Moulin Rouge opened in 1899 at the height of the Belle Epoque period. It's the birthplace of the original can-can dance, which was performed by carefully-selected local courtesans, for mostly male patrons.
The Moulin Rouge is still thriving. The 850-seat cabaret has two shows a night and is almost always full. Each year more than 600,000 people attend its shows, and 50 percent of the audience are women. A night out at the Moulin Rouge is not cheap. The price of a ticket can be as high as three hundred dollars, not including drinks and dinner. Still, most people exiting the Moulin Rouge after a show seem in good spirits and happy with the show.
Although the Moulin Rouge is a decidedly French icon, the female dancers are much more likely to be Australian than French. That's because, to dance at the cabaret, a female must be at least 5'9" (175cm). According to the Moulin Rouge, Australia "is a very good source of beautiful, long-legged girls." Apparently tall strong "boys" (at least 6'1", 185cm) are harder to come by in Australia since the majority of the 16 male dancers featured in the 60 member troupe are more likely to be Cuban, Spanish or Italian.
The Moulin Rouge conducts dance auditions all over the world. Finding a steady job in the dance world is not easy, and the turnout for these auditions is usually high. However, if you are thinking of trying out, you will have to have serious dance training in classical and advanced modern/jazz; meet the minimum height and physical requirements; and have a great stage presence and a bright personality.
The dance troupe performs two 105 minute shows, one at nine and one eleven p.m. It's a glamorous-looking occupation, where the dancers perform in hand-made shoes, clothed in sumptuous costumes of feathers, rhinestones and sequins, but performing and training can be grueling. The can-can is a dance that is fraught with injuries and everyone is expected to be able to perform it - with the exception of the topless dancers, who say not dancing the can-can is one of the perks of their jobs. In numerous television interviews and newspaper articles, many of the dancers say that in spite of their grueling schedule, they are happy to be dancing regularly, to be living in Paris and to be earning a decent if not extravagant wage.
Although the ambiance of Pigalle has not changed much over the years, signs of nearby gentrification are beginning to creep in. Just across the street from the famed music hall, on a site once occupied by the Cabarets of Heaven and Hell, is a Monoprix department store and an upscale natural food store. The neighborhood, however, has maintained its character for hundreds of years. The Moulin Rouge is thriving and in 2014 it celebrated its 125th anniversary. So, it seems that for now and probably for the foreseeable future, the vanes of its famous windmill will continue to turn.
To see videos from the Moulin Rouge, click here.
A bientôt,
Geraldine
(At a jazz club with JR)
