Until this week, Adelaide’s Crazy Horse strip club was probably most famously known as the venue where Shannon Noll was arrested in 2017. The 41-year-old singer and Australian Idol alumni had just been kicked out of the club when, according to eyewitness Alastair Longmuir, he “got really aggressive and being like ‘I’m Shannon Noll, let me back into the Crazy Horse’. Then he punched a security guard and four policemen like pinned him down.”
A truly momentous occasion in modern Australia’s cultural history, and a landmark moment for the venue.
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But that incident is now only the second wildest thing to ever happen at Crazy Horse. Because on Tuesday night, during the annual Miss Nude Australia contest, an adult performer forced the evacuation of the premises after she set the stage on fire.
Harley van Dangerfield is known for her incendiary performances: routinely setting the stage alight and using fire as a “symbol of resilience,” according to her Instagram. But her performance this week was brought to a premature end when her act set fire to the stage curtains and activated the venue’s sprinkler system, The Advertiser reports.
South Australian Metro Fire Services attended the club at about 12:10 a.m. on Wednesday and some 200 patrons were evacuated. Fire officers estimated that the club had sustained about $3,000 AUD ($2,018.19 USD) worth of damage.
Van Dangerfield was subsequently disqualified from Miss Nude Australia.
“I’m so sorry everyone for everything that happened last night,” she reportedly wrote on Instagram. “To all the competitors and the management team, it was an accident. I have officially been disqualified, good luck to everyone in Miss Nude this year.”
A male patron told news.com.au that the blaze from van Dangerfield’s performance—sparked using flammable liquid—erupted out of control when it started licking too close to the stage curtains.
“I think she’d finished with the batons… and she’d put them down and that’s when she squirted the ring of liquid around her and then lit it,” he said. The ring of fire then set the curtains alight. “She just kept on dancing. The fire alarms started going off and next minute the sprinklers are going all over the stage. I reckon she was doing a shower show.”
Crazy Horse has hosted the Miss Nude Australia pageant, where contestants from each state compete for the illustrious title, since 1991. This seems to be the first year it’s resulted in an evacuation.
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