EVENT: Les Demimondes (SummerWorks)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE OPERATION SNATCH (FORMERLY THE SCANDELLES) PRESENTS LES DEMIMONDES AT SUMMERWORKS AUGUST 12^TH TO 19^TH, 2012

“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think”.

The American author Dorothy Parker made this cutting remark almost 100 years ago when she was playing a game called I Can Give You a Sentence with her Vicious Circle cronies. She was asked to make a sentence with the word “horticulture”.

As clever as it is, it betrays a universal contempt for sex workers that time and again has proven fatal: violence against prostitutes as well as work-related mortality are higher than any other group of women ever studied. In Canada, where the fate of decriminalized sex work has been before the courts for two years and still hangs in the balance, sex workers continue to operate under laws that state it is legal to be a prostitute, yet simultaneously make it impossible to work under any reasonably safe conditions. Around the world, sex workers toil in legal limbo, risking arrest, murder, extortion and social expunction simply for using their own bodies to generate income. 

Dorothy Parker’s remark is also completely false. Looking at arts and media throughout time you will see that whores don’t need to be led to culture. Culture pursues whores. 

Through a multidisciplinary lens of dance, film, song, movement and monologue Les Demimondes looks at how fine arts, music, film, photography and the media have profited off the mystique of the whore while whores themselves remain marginalized and criminalized. These representations often further diminish the status of sex workers, painting unrealistic portraits or offering only the most squalid perspectives. 

Hosted by Prostitution herself, a Zelig-like character who leads us through famous depictions of prostitutes in the arts and media, Les Demimondes seeks restitution for the maligned sex worker. Who was Roxanne and why should she turn off her red light? What did Cicciolina think about Jeff Koons making millions off her notoriety while the same images of her in sex magazines sold for significantly less and to far less acclaim? And who were all those anonymous women betrayed and shamed by the scandal magazines of the fifties? What does Alphonsine Plessis think of how she was portrayed in The Lady of the Camellias and La Traviata? 

Prostitution is an archetypal trickster character, candid but prone to exaggeration, sly and sentimental, as wicked and as witty as can be. She engages her pantheon of notorious guests with salaciousness and compassion—she has been there, done that and has the notch in her bedpost to prove it. Still, for all her posturing, she is a sensitive soul who wonders, in a play-on-words of Parker’s play-on-words, why “whores have been given a sentence for so long.”

DEMIMONDES AT SUMMERWORKS

Lower Ossington Theatre, 100A Ossington, Toronto, M6J 2Z4, 416-915-6747,

Aug 12 at 10 pm • Aug 13 at 5 pm • Aug 14 at 10 pm • Aug 17 at 2:30 pm • Aug 18 at 7:30 pm • Aug 19 at 10 pm http://summerworks.ca/2012/portfolio/les-demimondes/

Media contact: Alex Tigchelaar alextigchelaar@rogers.com