CREDIT: VEERMAG.COM
The Suicide Girls are bringing their burlesque show to London on April 10.

Grab your friends, grab your lovers and leave your prudish inhibitions at the door, because after six years away, the most popular burlesque performance in North American history is making a return to Canada, bringing a steamy celebration of pop culture, alternative beauty and raw sexuality to the London Concert Theatre as the SuicideGirls Blackheart Burlesque show makes its return to northern shores.

Forget what old movies or that one episode of The Simpsons have taught you about burlesque, the performance on show is of a far less traditional vein. A grittier, more modern take while still retaining the sexy, teasing spirit of the performances of yesteryear. SuicideGirls co-founder and one of the show's creators Missy Suicide described it as “pretty kickass, it's set to a really modern soundtrack and the girls are doing some very cool dance moves.”

She reinforced that the dancers were genuinely dancing, before describing the old brand as “more about the tease, they would sort of prance between the numbers, and while we definitely take the sexy tease element, and a bit of the same feel, it's a much more modern spin on it.”

With choreography provided by Manwe Sauls-Addison, who has worked with the likes of Beyoncé and Lady GaGa, pieced with a modern soundtrack and dance numbers paying homage to some of pop culture's biggest franchises; Game of Thrones, Doctor Who and Kill Bill to name a few, the show promises to have something for anybody who holds even the slightest bit of interest in the pop culture of the last decade.

After the whirlwind success of the initial Blackheart Burlesque that included opening up for acts including Courtney Love and Guns n' Roses, the girls came to the conclusion that it was a little too time consuming and decided to take a year off to focus on another project. “The show was a lot of fun but it was quite a bit of work and we decided that we were going to take a season off and [write] a book, and then we decided to make a movie so that kept getting pushed off and pushed off,” explained Missy, citing the numerous films, books and television programs that her models have been involved in over the years.

She was able to pinpoint what it was that brought the show back to life. “When we put out our third coffee table book Hard Girls: Soft Light last spring, we sent two of our girls on a book signing tour up the West coast, primarily stopping at comic book shops ... we had a lineup of 500-750 people out the door just to get these two girls' autographs, and we knew we could put on a much better show than that.”

Sitting just outside of the mainstream, SuicideGirls has been celebrating all that is beautiful in being different for over a decade. With its humble beginnings as an online pin up site a small shadow of the Internet phenomenon that it has become. “We have over 12 million fans on various social networks,” said Missy Suicide. “The increase in their popularity has definitely helped to increase our profile.”

Millions of photos have been submitted to the website over the years, with a chosen few selected to join the SG ranks based on a mix of personality, uniqueness, and of course, the raw sexuality that is needed to convey the required confidence on camera. Over half of the members of the website are in fact female, a somewhat surprising statistic for a website that focuses on image of nude women, but not one that surprises Missy Suicide. “I think that the women on our site provide nude images yes, but they're done in a very tasteful, beautiful way that you don't often see in a lot of nude imagery and erotica.”

Despite the heart of the website consisting of the nude imagery that it was launched around, Missy credits the ability for members to join groups, read posts and subscribe to blogs based on an incredibly wide variety of topics, giving them the opportunity to interact with like-minded people across the world.

“All of our models keep blogs and they can interact and find people who share their interests, whether it's Japanese pop music, vegan cooking or Libertarian politics,” she laughed. “There really is a group for almost anything that you can imagine and our members can meet and interact with others who share their interests.” Not only a source of online friendships, the groups and forums of SuicideGirls has also had a real life effect for many members, something that Missy is extremely proud of. “We've had hundreds of thousands of really tight friendships made, couples that have met and married, and now there are babies born because their parents met on SuicideGirls; I think that extra connectivity is really strong.”

Many of the Suicide Girls are avid followers of what have long been considered to be “alternative” pursuits, comic books, and fantasy stories being a common topic among the websites blog posts, and it is this vested interest in the “geeky” that is a driving force behind the Blackheart performance. “We really want to bring the girls' interest, as well as our fans' interests into the burlesque,” describing most of the girls as extremely geeky. “Comic-Con is always our biggest event, all the girls are always asking to be the ones to go.”

As a lot of the cultural pursuits that a decade ago would have been considered out of the norm have become more mainstream, it widens the net of interest in the topics the SuicideGirls have always focused on, giving Missy great confidence for the future of her website.

“I think that people appreciating tattoos and our thoughtful, nerdy sort of culture is only a good thing, I hope that people still continue to grow with it and use SuicideGirls, there is always going to be outsider culture all over the world, and while we've become extremely popular with some demographics of it, there are plenty of people in the world who have still not heard of Suicide Girls.”

This one-of-a-kind performance is coming to London on April 10. Tickets are available at ticketmaster.com or blackheartburlesque.com.