She invented the cancan, inspired Toulouse-Lautrec, and died forgotten. Help bring Louise Weber's untold story to Edinburgh Fringe.

Louise: The Last Dance

The most famous woman you've never heard of. She was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, photographed by the most celebrated artists of her era, and written about in every gossip rag in France. She invented the cancan. She packed the Moulin Rouge every single night for years and was  the highest-paid entertainer in all of Europe. Her name was Louise Weber 'La Goulue'. And history forgot her before she was even dead.

Louise: The Last Dance is a 50-minute feminist solo theatre show about the woman the world knew as La Goulue — and it's heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August for 21 performances. I need your help to get it there.

Who Was Louise?

Louise came from nothing. An orphaned laundress's daughter from the outskirts of Paris, she borrowed her patrons' dresses to sneak into working-class dance halls as a teenager. By her mid-twenties she was the most talked-about woman in France. She wild, loud, unapologetically large, dancing like a force of nature. She had affairs with princes and dukes. She had love affairs with women that she fiercely denied in public while everyone around her knew the truth. She was mocked in the press for her weight, her drinking, her refusal to be respectable.

Then she left the Moulin Rouge to strike out on her own, and everything fell apart. A failed solo career. A pregnancy with an unknown father. An abusive marriage. A lion-taming act that eventually shrank to a laughing stock. The death of her son at 27. A slow descent into poverty and addiction, ending with Louise selling peanuts and cigarettes on the street corner outside the very club that had made her a star.

In 1928, weeks before her death, a documentary filmmaker named Georges Lacombe found her living in a caravan in a Paris flea market and asked her to dance. She did. That footage — an old, toothless, broken woman spinning in the mud with the grace of someone who never stopped hearing the music — is where my show begins.

The Show

Louise was one of the most documented women of her era. She was painted, photographed, written about, and analyzed constantly; but always by someone else, always for someone else's purposes. Her own words, her own testimony, her own version of events barely survive.

Louise: The Last Dance puts her in the room and finally lets her speak.

I play Louise across six decades of her life — from teenage laundress to Moulin Rouge superstar to lion tamer to the woman in that caravan — using music, projection and dance to collapse the distance between 1880s Paris and right now. The show is built around a simple, devastating question: what does it cost a woman to be seen by everyone and heard by no one?

Louise is the only character who speaks. Everyone else — the journalists, the bosses, the artists, the lovers — exist only in HER memory. Their words about her surround her. She moves through them, pushes back against them, and ultimately outlasts them.

Who I Am

I'm Stella Kulagowski (she/her), a Toronto-based performer, producer, and creator working under the name Saint Stella. I've spent over two decades in burlesque and theatre, with three consecutive sold-out Toronto Fringe productions, two appearances at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, and recognition including a Queer Emerging Artist Award from Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and a Rainbow Community Arts Grant.

I've been researching Louise's life for years — through French-language archival sources, court records, newspaper archives, and the handful of English-language scholarly works that take her seriously. I've made deliberate dramaturgical choices to centre her voice, consolidate her story for the stage, and approach her queerness, her addiction, and her poverty with the complexity and dignity they deserve.

This is not a show about the Moulin Rouge. It's a show about what it means to be a woman and an artist whose story was stolen from her. Something we still see again and again today. 

The Vision

I will be doing 21 performances at Greenside, Ivy Studio at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 7–29, 2025. Edinburgh is the largest arts festival in the world, and the Fringe is where solo performance, feminist work, and queer historical stories find their most passionate international audiences.

This is the right show for this stage. Louise's erasure isn't a historical curiosity, it's a pattern that's still happening to working-class women artists, to queer artists, to fat artists, to artists who refuse to be manageable. Edinburgh gives this story the international platform it deserves, and gives me the opportunity to bring it to touring venues far beyond Toronto.

My goal is to perform these 21 shows in Edinburgh, build an international audience for the work, and return to Canada with relationships, reviews, and momentum to tour this production further. On bigger stages, with professional actors and real stages, across Canada and beyond.

How Your Money Gets Louise to Edinburgh

The total cost of bringing this production to Edinburgh is $24,500 CAD. I've applied for grant support through the Canada Council for the Arts, but independent, unconnected artists presenting internationally rarely receive full funding if any. The gap between what grants cover and what a Fringe run actually costs is real, and it falls to the artist to close it.

Here's where your contribution goes:

Venue — Greenside @ Infirmary Street: $8,127 The performance space for all 21 shows. Greenside is one of Edinburgh's most respected Fringe venues, known for championing independent and international work.

Accommodation (25 nights in Edinburgh): $8,497 Solo touring means one person carrying the whole production. Stable housing for the full run isn't a luxury — it's how you survive a 21-show Fringe. I'll also be working my 9-5 job as much as possible while performing so I need a private space to live and SLEEP. 

Flights (Toronto → Edinburgh → Toronto): ~$1,000 Return travel for one performer/producer.

Edinburgh Production Support: $4,500 A local production assistant to handle technical load-in, equipment, and daily show support — essential for a performer who is also operating her own show.

Marketing, materials & contingency: $1,400 Edinburgh posters, flyering, press photos, and the unexpected expenses every Fringe artist knows are coming.

Toronto preview performances (June 2025): $400 Two preview performances in Toronto before Edinburgh to stress-test the show in front of a live audience. This is the final development stage before we fly.

Costumes props and incidentals: ~$1000

Every dollar you contribute goes directly into making this production happen. This is one woman, one story, one stage.

Why Now

Louise Weber died in January 1929, forgotten and destitute, outside the building that had made her famous.

Ninety-six years later, the conditions that erased her; the economic precarity of female artists, the cultural machinery that celebrates the men who document women while forgetting the women themselves, the cost of being queer and loud and uncontrollable in a world that wants you quiet — are not gone. They're just dressed differently.

This show is an act of reclamation. It's also, I think, an act of recognition for everyone who has ever felt gawked at and unheard at the same time.