Votre recherche

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.

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.

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.

: Taking Elin Diamond’s and Rebecca Schneider’s recent work in drama and performance studies as a starting point, this essay looks at two eras of burlesque in Montreal—the 1940s-50s and 2012—tracing a shifting landscape of popular entertainment, politics, religion, and social attitudes toward female sexuality. There is a central question underlying this examination: Why burlesque? Why now (or, rather, again?). I argue that burlesque offers an archive that evokes a different, more glamorous history than the one passed down to women by second-wave feminism. Burlesque also provides an alternative to popular culture’s commodification of female sexuality, technology’s mediation of social life, and heteronormative culture’s privatization of sexuality, giving women—and men—a stage on which to make fun of our cultural fixation with sex and the female body. Both nostalgically looking back and eagerly reaching for the new, neo-burlesque repeats the past as it simultaneously reinvents it.

How can the ephemeral touch of a caress become an aesthetic object? How can a fingernail scratching the mineral surface of a sheet of schist become music? How can intimate tactile experience become the scene of a collective artistic ritual? How does Magali Babin turn electronic sound into a medium for eccentric sensoriality? This article takes us into one region of Magali Babin’s artistic practice: the tactile world of sound that she uses in her solo performances. Author of a polymorphic sonic oeuvre, Magali Babin is a Quebec artist, performer, and composer whose artistic practice has incorporated sonic installations for the past two years. She is a key figure in Montreal’s alternative audio art, “edgy” improvisation, and experimental music scenes, moving freely among cutting-edge artistic categories.

Un article de la revue Jeu, diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Un article de la revue L'Annuaire théâtral, diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Dahlia Obadia interprète les danses de la tradition du moyen orient. Pendant sa carrières, elle a rémarque qu’il existe des grandes différences entre les interprétations de cette tradition vue de l’intérier et de l’extérieur. L’auteur décrit la vie de Dahlia et explore les problèmes qu’elle a affrontes pendant sa quête de sa propre identité culturelle.