Bottoms is the newest work from cutting-edge, fearless performance makers Two Destination Language, which makes its World Premiere as part of Dance International Glasgow, 14 – 15 May, 2025. Known for embracing joy on stage, and celebrating the power and movement of non-traditional dance bodies, Two Destination Language’s Bottoms explores the tradition of Can-Can, a dance which first evolved during the Industrial Revolution as a way for workers to escape social norms, let off steam and express themselves through wild displays of physical prowess. We sat down with Co-Director and Performer, Katherina Radeva to learn more about the production.
You describe Bottoms as a space of joy and abandon, but it’s also clearly political. How do you balance those two things—delight and defiance—on stage?
I honestly feel that joy is political. It is a political statement to look for joy in the current global political climate. Claiming a moment of delight is refusing to let the bastards get you down. If politicians don’t have to take their influence terribly seriously, and we’ve seen that in Boris as well as Trump, then there’s a defiance inherent in holding onto joy despite the horrifying impacts of military, environmental and economic misadventure. Those 60 minutes people choose to spend with us – we want them to feel like a release: leaving them entertained and surprised and thoughtful and hopefully with questions about the world we share. The balance is like life – you can’t have light without dark and you can’t recognise the shadows without the light.
The show reclaims the Can-Can from its commercialised, glamourised image. What surprised you most when digging into the dance’s roots and original spirit?
Workers, mostly men, would gather to drink after work and they began to throw some shapes, showing off and letting off steam. This was in opposition to the formally defined social dances of the time. Then, women joined the party by kicking their legs high along with the men. Then, business spotted an opportunity, and welcomed the cancan in their cabarets: they adopted and monetised the popular dance. At the same time Toulouse Lautrec was painting and drawing the girls kicking their legs and then, as now, the theatre management figured that sex sells. For functional reasons, many women’s underwear had an open crotch at the time, and so the high kicks teased audiences with what they might glimpse. So, the cancan was popularised for those who could pay to see the show, and occupy a particular kind of gaze as its audience.
I guess the most surprising thing for us was that men started it. You can really imagine the joy that dancing brought them, at the end of a hard working day. There’s something really delightful about imagining the dance before it was brought into the conformity of an entertainment to be bought and sold.
You mention that none of your dancers would meet the Moulin Rouge’s traditional criteria. How does that shift the energy and meaning of the Can-Can in Bottoms?
Well, none us would! You’ve got to be tall and thin, extremely fit with long legs, tiny waist etc. We are all gloriously different from that. I mean, I am a size 14, 43 year old perimenoposal woman – and I’m reclaiming the dance, remaking it for my body and the glorious group of dancers I’m part of in this.
We have deconstructed the dance choreographically – there is recognisable cancan, but we’re questioning the spectacle, and the gaze that the dance we’re familiar with invites, and the idealised bodies it relies on. At the same time, we’re fascinated by performance, the relationship it creates between an audience member and the people they’re watching. Is there a power dynamic, and how is it constructed? What can we do to play with that relationship? The cancan is a tool which lets us retain a handful of humour while we play with those questions.
This show seems to be in conversation with how we value labour and bodies—especially in performance. As artists in a post-pandemic, burnout-heavy world, what do you want audiences to take away from that?
We are working for you: on stage, in front of your eyes, we’re working. The things we do in the show: those are our jobs. It’s a job we love doing! The delight we take in our jobs (not the endless admin and producing and hoping that our work will be fairly remunerated, but the making and performing) is real, and at the same time it’s something we’re paid for. Paid to do it, and to make it look like we enjoy it so the audience goes away satisfied. People should be paid for their work, and that work should be satisfying. Maybe that comes back to the political, so in this show, we’re working hard for you. But in not being a group of ultra-flexible super-fit people who have trained in musicals (although some of us are some of these things) we are questioning what audiences really perceive and what is of value to that audience. The bodies and labour you see are shaped by years of training and lived experiences; what you see is shaped by the work that went into creating this through rehearsals and before those in planning and researching… Like lots of work, the visible labour is only a fraction of what’s involved.
There’s a lot of humour in your work—why is that important when you’re dealing with topics like capitalism, conformity, and exhaustion?
If we took a melancholic approach, we could just accept defeat in the face of capitalism, and its demand for conformity and its insistence on exhausting us through labour and consumption. Humour can be a really powerful tool: we might not individually have a lot of power (or capital), but we can resist the demand that we take seriously the values of capitalism and its destructive attitude towards nature and people. There’s room for essays and politics, but we want to deal with some of those things by offering something to smile about.
You’re performing in Bottoms as well as co-directing. How does being in the work physically affect the way you shape the show and connect with your audience?
That wasn’t the plan. It turned out we needed another person to make the show work, and so I joined in. It has been hard to hold and carry many hats, and what feels right inside the work doesn’t always look right from outside. Video is a brilliant tool for helping all of us on stage step outside and see what we’re creating. We’re working with a really superb team of performers, shaping lots of the work together. Our process is a bit like sculpture: we’ve got a block of stone and need to let the shape inside it become visible. Sometimes, one area is beautiful but doesn’t match the whole, and we have to reshape or remove it. But also, we’re shaping it to match this company of performers: made with different people, it would look and feel different, and that’s the same with my role in it too. I can’t be in and out at any moment, so more of the design, the conceptual thinking and the composition of the work has taken place between rehearsal weeks – and I think we all benefit from those breaks.
Tickets for Bottoms can be found here.