Sasha Van Bon Bon

Reception Thursday February 1st, 7-11pm.
Performance at 8pm.

Paul Petro Multiples + Small Works
962 Queen St West
Toronto, ON  M6J 1G8

Hours:  Wednesday - Sunday, 12-6pm

Sasha Van Bon Bon (Alex Tigchelaar) is a writer and theatre creator from Montreal who now lives in Toronto. She began making pasties as a burlesque performer four years ago because she found the existing market lacked flamboyant and original styles.

"I like the pasty as an artistic medium because it is an extravagance created out of necessity-my favourite kind," she says. "Burlesquers wore them as a way of circumventing a law that stated they were not allowed to show their nipples in the context of a performance. I love that women found an even more lurid way of displaying their wares and I adore artifice born of oppression, oppression being so congenital to fetish."

As Dorothy Parker said when she walked into a party, noticed guests playing a parlor game and was told they were ducking for apples, "that but for a typographical error is the story of my life." Sasha's company is similarly named after a more wholesome pursuit-her late grandfather's famous cake shop in Oakville, The Continental Pastry. Apparently he would have found this absolutely hilarious.