Ivor Jones takes us back to the time of the big ‘tits-and-feather shows’ when busloads of audiences travelled to Sun City to experience that fabulously exotic world and be touched by its glamour, the excitement, the frivolity of it, its titillation. Those sensual escapes from life’s mundanity into an indulged world of beautiful half naked boys and feather clad girls. It was another time, another era. That heady escapist experience that for decades made Paris an exotic, exciting destination; the Folies Bergère, the Lido, the Moulin Rouge.

It was at the Lido that Ivor experienced some of the best years of his life. It is one thing to be part of a swooning audience, another to be dancing on that exotic world-renowned stage. Ivor Jones did exactly that and he takes us through the training, the discipline, their absurdly rigorous hours. But if you are a South African in Paris and you have been accepted into one of these famous nightclubs, you must be good, very good in fact.

He has had an incredible life, which he shares in this interview, different to that of many dancers. Dancing was his passion, starting with ballet under David Poole in Cape Town, across to Paris and into the Lido. At the end of his dancing career, he returned and for the next twenty-seven years ran those extraordinary Extravaganzas at Sun City for Sol Kerzner, bringing a little of that Paris exoticism he became so intimate with, to the bushveld.