Votre recherche

C’est là un ouvrage de référence qui présente la recherche sur la musique, les genres et les sexualités, et plus largement la vie musicale non dominante au Québec depuis le dernier quart du XIXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Issu des travaux réalisés en 202-2022 par le pôle universitaire DIG! Différences et inégalités de genre dans la musique au Québec (D!G), un réseau interdisciplinaire et intersectoriel qui réunit les chercheur·ses, publics, artistes et autres professionnel·les de la musique qui s’intéressent à cette thématique, l’ouvrage comprend une revue de la littérature et une bibliographie de plus de 800 ressources scientifiques.

The documentary Show Girls, directed by Meilan Lam, makes an unprecedented contribution to the history of jazz and Black women jazz dancers in Montréal, Quebec, and to the conversation of jazz in Canada. Show Girls offers a glimpse into the lives of three Black women dancers of the 1920s–1950s. This essay asks what the lives of Black women dancers were like and how they navigated their career paths in terms of social and economic opportunities and barriers. I seek to better understand three points: (1) the gap in the study of jazz that generally excludes and/or separates dance and singing from the music; (2) the use of dance as a way to commercialize, sell, and give visual and conceptual meaning to jazz; (3) the importance of the Black body and the role of what I would define as “Afro- culture” in producing the ingenious and creative genre of jazz. My study suggests there is a dominant narrative of jazz, at least in academic literature, that celebrates one dimension of jazz as it was advertised in show business, and that bringing in additional components of jazz provides a counternarrative, but also a restorative, whole and more authentic story of jazz and its origins. More specifically, by re- exploring jazz as a whole culture that relies on music, song, and dance, this essay explores three major ideas. First, Black women dancers played a significant role in the success of jazz shows. Second, they articulated stories of self, freedom, and the identity of the New Negro through jazz culture and dance. Third, Black women’s bodies and art were later crystallized into images that further served to sell jazz as a product of show business.

Quebec-born playwright Chantal Bilodeau has been responding to the challenges of dramatizing anthropogenic climate change by developing an eight-part Arctic Cycle, each play of which is set in one of the nations that claims Arctic territory. Sila (2014) immerses audiences into a complex network of humans, animals, and mythical beings crisscrossing the Canadian Arctic. These movements circle around the Inuit concept of sila, which is the life-giving force of breath and voice. Thus, the sonic world of Sila focuses on voices speaking words, on performance poetry, and on the sounds of breath and wind. Bilodeau’ s second Arctic Cycle play, Forward (2016), addresses the long-term impact of Fridtjof Nansen’s polar exploration of the 1890s on Norway’s economy and society. In terms of sound, Forward features multiple musical performances rangingfrom traditional songs to European opera arias and Lieder to contemporary Norwegian electro-pop. The sonic features of both plays stress interdependence across time, space, as well as (non-)human, earthly, and metaphysical realms. Sila and Forward address climate change in a non-universalizing manner which promotes a heterarchical (rather than hierarchical) aesthetic fit for a growing awareness of planetary relationality.

In this review, I discuss the architectonics of sound composition according to sound artist and designer Nancy Tobin. This chapbook advocates for a comprehensively integrated presence of a sound artist in the processes of rehearsal and espouses a dramaturgy of hearing. Tobin’s distinction between hearing and listening gives forth onto a series of self-studies of her experience of spatial and temporal arrangements presented in the form of e-mails to mentees. Her appreciation for the acoustics of the performance space extends to the composition of sound to be heard (on occasion as boldly interventionist) and the technologies of broadcasting it: the choice and placement of speakers, as well as their interaction with the performers. Tobin argues for a definition of sound composition for performance as a complex collaboration with the production—curatorial in terms of the space of ephemerality. My review concurs with the efficacy of her approach by my recognition of the moments in productions that have remained as some of the most memorable of my theatregoing.

Article sur l'artiste sonore Nancy Tobin.

Dans la littérature sur la danse exotique de la première moitié du xxe siècle, la danseuse noire apparaît soit comme la victime d’une industrie du divertissement capitalisant sur les mises en scène érotisantes, exotisantes et primitivisantes de son corps, soit comme la parodie subversive du stéréotype dit « primitif-exotique » incarné sur scène. Pour paraphraser bell hooks, le plaisir corporel, voire charnel, lié à la danse est avant tout abordé en tant que réalité à laquelle il faut résister, qui doit être masquée ou transcendée, ce qui force ainsi un processus de distanciation entre le travail artistique de la danseuse et le capital érotique de son corps. Dans cet article, l’auteure s’appuie sur une collection d’entretiens réalisés dans le contexte du travail de recherche ayant mené à la production cinématographique Show Girls: Celebrating Montreal’s Legendary Black Jazz Scene (1999) avec des danseuses qui travaillaient dans l’industrie du spectacle durant l’« âge d’or » du jazz montréalais (1925-1955). Les récits que révèlent ces entretiens permettent d’aller au-delà des questions de représentation dans la littérature sur la danse exotique pour poser un regard sur l’agentivité artistique de ces femmes qui résistent à la désarticulation entre leur travail artistique et le capital érotique de leurs corps.

Solutions constructives pour des rendez-vous musicaux plus vivants, diversifiés et… paritaires!

This dissertation maps the interaction between jazz, identity, modernity and nation during the so-called "golden age" of jazz in Montreal (1925-1955). Drawing on the fields of musicology, women's studies (black feminist theory and feminist research methods in particular), critical dance studies, and cultural studies, this project provides a critical re-writing of the history of Montreal jazz, one which acknowledges various roles that racialized and ethnicized women played in the shaping of modern identities, pleasures and sounds in Quebec. Montreal's particular status as a "showtown" makes it a rich laboratory to study the collaborative creative relationships between jazz music and dance on the black variety stage in the first half of the twentieth century. I also map the specific parameters that articulate the discursive relationship between jazz and vice, in particular as these relate to the gendered and racialized embodiment of morality in interwar Quebec. Finally, this dissertation produces the first extensive biographical accounts and critical listening of several prominent Montreal-based female jazz artists, including pianists Vera Guilaroff and Ilene Bourne, all-girl groups such as The Spencer Sisters and the Montreal Melody Girls Orchestra, black women performers such as Tina Baines Brereton, Bernice Jordan Whims, Marie-Claire Germain, Mary Brown, Natalie Ramirez, as well as piano teacher Daisy Peterson Sweeney and dance teachers Ethel Bruneau and Olga Spencer Foderingham.

Towards an African Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance, is the first book to consoloidate the field of African Canadian Art History. In this book, Charmaine A. Nelson and her colleagues--a group of established and up-and-coming artists, scholars, and cultural critics--argue for an African Canadian Art History that can simultaneously examine the artistic contributions of black Canadian artists within their unique historical contexts, critique the colonial representation of black subjects by white artists, and contest the customary racial homogeneity of Canadian Art History. Challenging the traditional notions of artistic value, this groundbreaking book examines art, artists, and visual and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing "high," "low," and popular art across various media, with a focus to offer a new perspective on Canadian Art History--an African Canadian Art History

Cet article porte sur les rôles que les femmes ont joué dans le développement d’une scène jazz à Montréal. Les archives témoignent de l’importance des pianistes Vera Guilaroff et Ilene Bourne, de l’enseignante de piano Daisy Peterson Sweeney, des enseignantes de danse Olga Spencer Foderingham et Ethel Bruneau, ainsi que des danseuses de variétés dans le développement de la plus grande scène jazz du Canada au cours de la première moitié du xxe siècle. Cet article contextualise la présence des femmes dans ces espaces performantiels précis (le piano, l’enseignement, la danse) et explore les processus historiographiques liés à leur exclusion des récits historiques.

Interest in audio-visual works of art that are performed by a live pianist while integrating projected moving visual images has waxed and waned over a period of almost 300 years. The past twenty years or so has seen a re-emergence of this genre of classical music composition which places extra demands on the pianist performing these works. This dissertation explores the history of this genre, proposes a framework for analysis of these pieces, and examines from both analytical and performance perspectives three contrasting works for this medium: Michel van der Aa’s 'Transit', Nicole Lizée’s 'Hitchcock Études', and 'Surface Tension' by Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby. This research was

This study examines the creative layers and continuities evident within the composition and rehearsal processes of Nicole Lizée’s Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop (Fibre-Optic Flowers), written for the Kronos Quartet in 2012. Lizée’s compositional approach to the historic and the new, and the mechanical and the human, are interpreted through Simon Emmerson’s three themes of combination, transformation, and control, and his three “impulses within composition” that combine live and acousmatic soundworlds – integration, antithesis, and co-existence. These concepts also help to articulate the way the players engage with the physical, psychological, and expressive demands of the piece. Discussions arising from the Kronos Quartet rehearsing the piece with the composer reveal how extensions are made to the performers’ mind and body experiences when they are required both to initiate and integrate sounds emanating from unfamiliar, analogue machines into their acoustic, yet amplified soundworld. Creative layers and continuities are seen to evolve from compositional experimentation and from composer–performer and co-performer dialogues in rehearsal in the BBC Maida Vale studio prior to the world premiere at a BBC Prom concert on 24 July 2012.

Ce texte revient sur le processus de création de trois spectacles chorégraphiques auxquels j’ai participé comme conceptrice sonore : Concerto grosso pour corps et surface métallique (1999), Duos pour corps et instruments (2003) et Là où je vis (2007). Ces parcours de recherche-création, traversés avec la chorégraphe Danièle Desnoyers (compagnie Le Carré des Lombes), permettent d’observer comment l’écriture sonore se développe in situ avec l’écriture chorégraphique. Les deux se forment ensemble en s’influençant l’une l’autre. Les trois spectacles choisis témoignent de différents modes de création de la matière sonore : amplification des danseurs, diffusion avec des haut-parleurs inusités, invention d’instruments et citation de musiques transformées. Les récits de collaborations qui suivent révèlent les manières dont la matière sonore a émergé de l’écriture chorégraphique et vice versa.