Review | Black cabaret: being black ★★★★

“We are black. We recognize each other. Right now we know something no one else knows. We know something no one else knows. And even when we try to articulate this thing, this pain, this injustice, this repeated story, we rarely manage to be believed because the stories are believed. »

Iris Gagnon Paradise
The Press

This text, “spark plug” of the show Black Cabaret, Mélanie Demers wrote it following the death of Georges Floyd. She evokes the “black code”, this nod of the head when two blacks meet, this detection of a suffering crossing the generations, linking black people to one another. And it is a work of fragmented archiving, of mashup cultural, historical and artistic of black history and identity that she offers with this cabaret bringing together six performers, including herself.

To the white spectator, it does not offer ready-made and very smooth answers to understand the black person, his reality, his suffering, this “black code” from which he is forever excluded. And this is very well so. Because, as this quotation launched on the fly in the opening scene of the show evokes, the White does not have to “understand” the Black. He must first understand himself, and the history he carries with him.

Black, this “counter-color” of white, absence or sum of all colors. A phrase that Demers repeats, on which she insists, after the first “number” (we are in a cabaret, after all) where the performers, seated in a circle, each at their table, will read passages from works — Aimé Césaire, Dany Laferriere, Amin Maalouf, Lilian Thuram (white thought), Toni Morrison, but also the back cover of a Lonely Planet on West Africa, dripping with high-sounding clichés… — before throwing the books in a scattered pile in the center of the stage. Auto-da-fé without fire, but loaded with meaning.

What does it mean to be black? What is black identity made up of? The answer is multiple, mixed, and would not fit into a single definition. And it is this diversity of black individualities that Demers — who acts here as a choreographer, but above all as a director, a first in her case — declines brilliantly in this creation which is right on target.

Gall in honey jars

In turn, this squad of talent that the artist has gathered around her weaves her universe, deploys her playground, through numbers inspired by musical, literary and cinematographic works, but also by the very personal experiences of each.

Stacey Désilets, breathtaking performer with a powerful energy charge, launches the ball with a bang, on the lament Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, taken over by Kanye West; later, she howls like “metal” the Creole song of Doualé in Master key then proposes “Tropical beauty”, an assemblage of stereotyped lascivious gestures, ingeniously diverted.

With his litany, Vlad Alexis goes there with “comments collected since 1989”; necklace of insults, repeated until breathlessness, in French, in English, in Spanish. Florence Blain Mbaye and her absolutely magnificent voice sing a hymn taken from the Old Testament, “I am beautiful and (but) I am black”, reluctantly, pulling her hair, crushing her face. With comedian Anglesh Major, she becomes Desdemona, and he Othello, remixing a scene from Shakespeare’s famous play over and over again, a highlight of the show.

We also come across in particular in black cabaret a scene from the series Launch and Account (which will provoke embarrassed and horrified sighs in the room, with good reason…), another from the film The 25th Hour by Spike Lee, with Paul Chambers and Anglesh Major, a powerful segment unearthing the roots of American racism, in all its forms.

As Demers nicely says in the booklet given to readers at the end of the show, and allowing to continue the reflection initiated: “We pour our gall, certainly. But we give it back to you in little jars of honey. »

It is by playing with this contrast, and also that, omnipresent in the aesthetic signature, of black and white, as a real tightrope walker, that black cabaret grabs and makes you think, but without ever adopting a moralizing tone. It is rather to a celebration that the public is invited; a celebration that sometimes takes on funereal airs, but driven by a fire that nothing can extinguish.

And Mélanie Demers, recipient of the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal in 2021 for her show The goddam milky waya play that questions by deconstructing received ideas around femininity, shows that she still has a lot to say, and does so, once again, with relevance and intelligence, avoiding pitfalls and the beaten path.