SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque at Crocks, 8 April 2014

Creation Body Piercing put its name on this one twice. It shared the presenting credit with Loffredo & Associates for SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque at Crocks on Tuesday 8 April 2014, and it was one of four places in town where a $25 ticket could be bought, alongside Bean Fiend, Rainbow on Bay and Extreme Pita.

Doors opened at 8 p.m. The event was 19+, which is the ordinary rule for a licensed room in Ontario. An online-only pre-sale had opened weeks earlier, on Thursday 13 February, and the full announcement followed on 6 March, a little over a month before the date. Only one ticket price was given, and it applied to every ticket.

What the show was

SuicideGirls began as a website in Portland, Oregon, in September 2001, founded by Selena Mooney, who worked under the name Missy Suicide, and Sean Suhl. It grew into an online community built around alternative pin-up photography, with member profiles, blogs and interest groups. The touring stage show grew out of the site, and it is the part of the brand that travels to clubs.

The announcement said the burlesque tour crossed North America for five years in the early 2000s, with headlining dates and slots opening for Guns N’ Roses and Courtney Love, plus festival dates in Europe and Australia. It then went quiet for close to a decade. The show returned in 2013 with new music and new routines, and the Thunder Bay date sat in that revival.

The company

Seven dancers from the SuicideGirls roster were billed, which makes it a company of seven on a club stage. The copy credited the choreography to Manwe Sauls-Addison, who it said had worked with Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga. It described the programme as a tribute to pop culture, with humour built in, and adult in tone, and the event was 19+.

The same copy called the result the ultimate tribute to pop culture that burlesque had produced. That is a promoter’s superlative and cannot be checked. No individual performers were named, and no set length was given, so the shape of the hour is left to the reader.

The night sits closer to a dance revue than to a band gig. No support act was billed, and the whole evening was the company’s own. For a club that mostly booked touring bands, it was one of the few dates in the spring with a choreographed programme.

The tour had a wider reach than the stops in one city suggest. Beyond the United States and Canada it has played in Australia, the United Kingdom and Chile, and a Thunder Bay date was one small piece of that itinerary.

Nine days after The Glorious Sons

Two other Crocks nights bracket this one. On 30 March, nine days earlier, The Glorious Sons, a rock band from Kingston, Ontario, played with Teenage Kicks for $8 online, with doors at 9 p.m.

A week after the burlesque date, on 15 April, the Jamaican dancehall artist Beenie Man came to the same stage on a tour called The Hottest Man Alive, with advance tickets at $30.

Set against the promoter’s other priced shows in 2014, which ran from $5 to $50 across ten dates, twenty-five dollars sat near the middle. Of the three nights the eight-dollar Glorious Sons show was the cheapest. This was a plain middle price: one tier, no meet-and-greet, no VIP add-on.

A Tuesday in April

A Tuesday is an early-week night for a show with a full company, and the date reads like a stop in a touring schedule, with the company moving from one city to the next. That is a reading of the calendar, not a statement from the announcement.

The pre-sale is the odd part of the timing. It opened on 13 February, more than three weeks before the announcement’s own date of 6 March, so the first buyers held tickets weeks before the general announcement reached anyone else. More nights from that spring are collected on the shows page.

From the first pre-sale ticket to the doors on 8 April was nearly eight weeks.