John Katsilometes on a photographer who has the Playboy assignment to do a pictorial on the women of ‘La Femme’

Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006 | 7:09 a.m.

For a week, Patrick Wilen has spent many hours observing beautiful nude women. "But to me, they are not naked," he says. "I do not see the nudity."

Wilen is a world-class freelance photographer, and for the past week his subjects have been the 13 captivating women of "La Femme," the U.S. version of the famed French "Crazy Horse" adult revue. The Las Vegas production, a hit for six years at the MGM Grand, will be featured in an eight-page photo essay in an issue of Playboy in the fall of 2007. It is just the second Playboy pictorial of a "Crazy Horse" production. The first focused on the Paris cast in April 1978.

This is no pose-in-a-studio operation. Wilen has been given full run of the La Femme Theatre and is shooting the cast (over and over in many cases) candidly onstage during dance numbers and also backstage.

The cast has been working five-hour shifts, essentially performing entire shows many times over, for the pictorial. Then the performers break for a few hours before returning to the stage for their scheduled show.

"The idea is to shoot the dancers dancing, not posed, to show the movement and the lighting," said Wilen, whose crew spent two days calibrating the ideal lighting setup.

"It is art. These are dancers, athletes. It is not a nudie show with lap dances. Sometimes they have to do the same number three, four, five times to get the right shot But they are great. I have never worked with a nicer, more forthcoming group of people in my life."

"La Famme" dance captain Marianne Veritas, herself a former "Crazy Horse" dancer in Paris, said the cast trusts Wilen and the process.

"At first I was always checking over his shoulder to make sure (the photos) looked good," Veritas said. "But no more. We're confident. No more checking."

Note Mart

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