Saint Stella is a fixture of Toronto’s performing arts community, a performer, producer, and multidisciplinary theatre artist. Their latest show — Louise: The Last Dance — brings to life the story of the woman who invented the iconic can-can dance.
They’re performing two shows that bring the character to Toronto before they head to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the show’s international debut from August 7 to 29.
Saint Stella
With an educational background in visual art that includes a BFA in Photography from Toronto Metropolitan University, Saint Stella has carved a 20+ year career that incorporates dance, theatre, burlesque, and visual art.
Stella has produced three consecutive sold-out Toronto Fringe productions; Lysistrata, Carmilla, and Mayhem at Miskatonic. Those productions seamlessly brought together movement, text, and contemporary cabaret.
Stella is a frequent performer in the Toronto burlesque scene and beyond, including award winning performances in Las Vegas and Massachusetts. Stella has performed twice at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, received an Emerging Queer Artist Award from Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and a Rainbow Community Arts Grant.
Louise Weber: La Goulue
It is believed that Louise Weber was born to Jewish parents in the Alsace region of France. She worked in her mother’s laundry before making the break to dance halls.
She launched her dance career in small clubs in and near Paris, and quickly learned how to work the crowd. Louise developed her signature can-can dance to tease her audience with a glimpse of the heart she’d embroidered on her knickers. Sometimes, she’s flip a man’s hat off his head with a high kick.
She began posing for artists and photographers to earn extra money after meeting Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted her often. A favourite subject of his, his iconic posters and paintings of her performances at the Moulin Rouge are now valued as emblematic of the Parisian Belle Époque.
She was the headline act at the Moulin Rouge in 1889, where her high kicking dance drew crowds of wealthy patrons. Louise earned her nickname, La Goulue, which means “the glutton” due to her habit of finishing customer’s drinks while she danced by. Legend has it that she walked a goat on a leash, and once, during a dance, she called out, “Hey Wales! The Champagne’s on you?” to the Prince of Wales.
In 1895, she left the Moulin Rouge, and invested her own money into a show where she performed with live wild animals. She toured around France as part of a fair, and went on to perform as a belly dancer and in a sideshow for about five decades.
Behind the fame, money, and her cheeky public persona, there was a much darker side, however. She was a survivor of domestic violence.
Louise was eviscerated by a vicious press who, at the same time as they dubbed her the Queen of Monmartre, reduced her to a string of lurid headlines.
Eventually, she exhausted the money she’d made during her heyday, and now poor and struggling with alcoholism, she returned to Montmartre. She lived her final days in a caravan, tending to stray animals and eking out a living selling peanuts, cigarettes, and matches on the street.
Louise Weber died in 1929 at age 62 and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
Louise Weber in the early 1920s:
The Show
Louise: The Last Dance weaves together live performance, projection, archival media, and dance. It poses an essential question that resonates to this day — whose stories are told? Whose stories are buried in time?
Saint Stella has taken from archival research and press of the era, including a rare documentary that was filmed of Louise just weeks before her death.
The solo work takes place in Paris, 1928. As an old woman, Louise is dressed in rags, and lives in a caravan in a slum market. The woman who made the Moulin Rouge famous, was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, and once had princes at her fingertips is living in poverty and obscurity.
Journalists laid waste to her career and legacy. She was not able to speak for herself then — but the show gives her a voice. It turns out, she’s loud, queer, and has got a lot to say about what happened to her.
Louise: The Last Dance gives a voice to this historical figure whose life and story were never under her own control.
World Premiere Preview Workshop (June 5, 2026)
The world premiere preview of Louise: The Last Dance will represent that first public presentation, and a workshop of the complete work. The performance is followed by an audience talk back. Press and interviewers are invited and encouraged to attend in support of the independently produced and self-funded project.
The premiere takes place at Society Clubhouse (967 College Street)
Community Hell / Skirt / Fund-Raiser at Society Clubhouse (June 19, 2026)
After a preview of Louise: The Last Dance, the show turns into a burlesque showcase and dance party in celebration of the Toronto performance community. The burlesque showcase features Arra Kiss, Cleo Tantra, Evelyn Crane, Maximum Capacity, Sugar Holiday, and others, followed by the dance party with DJs Melelectric and Butt Mitzfah.
The show is for theatre kids, the burlesque lovers, the queer community, and everyone who believes that art made outside the mainstream matters.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Louise: The Last Dance makes its international debut from August 7 to 29 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at Greenside @ George Street (Ivy Studio). Thee will be daily performances at 4:10 p.m.
- Find tickets and details about the show, and both Toronto performances, [HERE].
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