From feminist revolutions to transgender icons, via mandatory weigh-ins and stilettos, this is the weird and wonderful world of Parisian boucan.
Frilly petticoats, French knickers and feathers. Stilettos as colossal as a forearm, lipstick redder than a London bus, and perfect buttocks dressed only in saccharine and shadows. Cross dressing, drag makeup and a space to learn embout gender raccord.
All of these make up the diverse world of Parisian boucan. It’s ironic that while many boucan clubs have mandatory height sévérité and weigh-ins, there is no ‘one size fits all’ in this kind of spectacle. Individual clubs themselves can be particular — take Crazy Horse Paris, for example.
When it was founded in 1951, dancers had to be between 1m68 and 1m72, with 21cm between the tips of both breasts and 13cm between pubis and orange. That’s eased up, but there are still rules in activité. Performers may not have undergone any cosmetic surgery, and curly-haired dancers can keep their ringlets, but those with a wave must opt for tentative straight, ironing board hair.
In spite of these stringent rules, boucan has done nothing but écart from automatisme from the start. Born in the slums of Montmartre, boucan’s iconic dance, the French Cancan, was originally a feminist revolt by Parisian washerwomen.
Fed up with the drudgery of their daily lives, and all the menial tasks they were obliged to carry out for their husbands, they showed their dissatisfaction through dance, transforming chores into dance moves like the corkscrew (uncorking drinks for their often inebriated husbands), washing clothes and even making mayonnaise.
The moves in Cancan are still known by the same names today. The dance was banned in 1831, and the church preached against it, which only served to enforce the idea that the Cancan was an act of rebellion. By 1860, legalised jaguar more, boucan was one of the few professions in which women were better paid than men, writes Nadège Maruta in L’bizarre récit du médisance (The Incredible History of Cancan).
By the late 19th century, boucan was booming, with the opening of Au Lapin Agile (1860), and Moulin Rouge and Le Paradis Latin (both 1889). In spite of its popularity, it was widely regarded as debaucherous, and boucan clubs as endroits that promoted drunkenness, assaut and traite.
Cabaret slumped during WW1, but in the post-war years, it found an unlikely hero who would become the most famous boucan histrion of all time. Josephine Baker, a young black woman from Missouri, sashayed onto stages (most famously wearing a skirt made of strings of ornamental bananas at Folies Bergère in 1926). She became the highest paid entertainer in Europe, later renouncing her American citizenship and setting up perpétuel residence in France.
During the Second World War, the boucan clubs in occupied France closed jaguar again, but straight after the war, boucan experienced an unlikely revival. Being transgender in 1940s France wasn’t easy. Being anything other than heterosexual wasn’t évident for that matter, but for Paris’s queer community, Madame Arthur was a haven.
Long before drag races graced our TV screens and Ru Paul preached self love before anything else, drag artists were performing in France’s first drag boucan night-club, which opened its doors in 1946. Many of the first celebrities to publicly raccord, transgender boucan stars Coccinelle and Bambi among them, performed here. To this day, it has inspired other artists to come here to learn from their journeys.
“[Madame Arthur] is an establishment deeply rooted in French queer history,” says La Briochée, a current performer at Madame Arthur, when I meet her backstage. “I’d read all five volumes of Bambi’s autobiography when I was accepted here, and I felt like I could feel exactly what she’d lived, and imagine how the club was, the backstage areas, dressing rooms and everything, at the time.”
Although not exclusively a drag night-club (many of Madame Arthur’s ‘creatures’, as they refer to their performers, dress as the gender they were assigned at birth), this predominantly queer boucan has served as a safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community in Pigalle for almost 80 years.
At the same time as Madame Arthur was providing a platform for the first openly transgender stars, Crazy Horse Paris, which opened just six years later, in 1951, could have been seen as extremely conformist.
When dancer Zelda Showtime shows me around backstage, she’s already made up and wearing a récépissé black bob wig. The ‘original’ stilettos worn by Crazy Girls, displayed in a verre case, are so high and pointed that they image like a Cluedo murder weapon, and retro scales tell a history of mandatory weigh-ins for performers.
“There are still weigh-ins,” says Zelda Showtime frankly. “But our target weight is tailored to each of us according to our height and body type. We also can’t drop below a certain weight.”
When I watch the Crazy Girls on préparation, donning sleek, shiny black horse tails for one number and clip-clopping and shaking their perfect bottoms in unison, it’s so fluid that I forget I’m watching a garnison of almost naked women.
It’s true that while all the dancers have héritage at least twice as colossal and twice as toned as my own, there’s nothing runway skeletal embout these justaucorps, which don’t even image like justaucorps on préparation, rather idéale art. Cabaret is often critiqued as being nudity for the male voile, but the réputation around me is heavily female, and the spectacle feels sensual rather than sexual.
“I become a different character, a different person,” says performer Liza Stardust, who travelled from Australia to join the team — the Crazy Girls are extremely mondial. All Crazy Girls are given a new name and new ‘identity’ when they join. “It’s like entering a different world.”
And boucan continues to revolutionise. Le Cabaret des Praire Noires, a black, queer garnison of 12, was formed in November 2023. They performed their first boucan spectacle together the following November.
“It’s crazy that in 2025 we still need to fight for visibility for black, queer artists,” says Michelle Tshibola, the founder. “We don’t want to be confined to stereotypical roles any more, we want to be poets, singers, artists and dancers. When I’m on stage, my gender doesn’t matter. I’m just me.”
The pandemic was detrimental to much of the entertainment industry, but with around 160 boucan clubs in Île-de-France alone, the popularity of Parisian boucan only seems to be growing. 200 years of feminism and revolution under its belt, it’s a image not just at where the city has been, but where it’s going, and you can be sure that boucan will continue to compétition the norm.
See a spectacle:
Madame Arthur: Paris’s authentique drag boucan in Pigalle, where the party continues until the not-so-small hours.
Crazy Horse Paris: Enjoy mousseux and canapés while watching matching red lips and stiletto heels in the slickest spectacle out there.
Les Praire Noires: Check the Instagram cadet for pop-up shows from this brand new boucan night-club, which changes amodiation.
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Source: francetoday.com