Festival cancels slave-song show
Protests target white-led stage production
MONTREAL• The Montreal International Jazz Festival has cancelled all performances of a slave-song show featuring a predominantly white cast and apologized “to those who were hurt.”
Wednesday’s announcement came as festival organizers faced mounting pressure over SLĀV, including Moses Sumney’s decision to cancel his scheduled concert Tuesday night in protest.
“Since the beginning of SLĀV performances, the Festival team has been shaken and strongly affected by all comments received,” the festival said in a statement. “We would like to apologize to those who were hurt. It was not our intention at all.”
The collaboration between theatre director Robert Lepage and singer Betty Bonifassi — both white — raised some eyebrows when it was announced last fall, but the controversy broke into the open at last week’s première.
Protesters gathered outside the venue on Ste. Catherine Street and patrons passed through a police cordon to enter the theatre.
Sumney, a rising soul star, announced his cancellation on the eve of his Tuesday night show, opting to perform at a non-festival club. In a letter to festival organizers that he released, he said it was “not okay” to have white performers singing slave songs in any context.
“Especially not while they are dressed like poor field workers or cotton pickers. Especially not while they are directed by a white director and in a theatre charging loads of money,” he wrote.
“This kind of black imitation is very reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows. The only thing missing is black paint.”
The show had been billed as “a theatrical odyssey based on slave songs” and a “tribute to music as a tool for resilience and emancipation.”
But protesters said it amounted to whites appropriating a black cultural form, and they criticized the festival for not including black artists. Of the seven performers on stage, just two are black.
Reviewers have described how at one point the chorus, wearing scarves in their hair and holding baskets, mime picking cotton. At another, Bonifassi plays the role of Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist who was born into slavery.
A letter signed by Montreal artists, academics and community organizers calling for the show’s cancellation said the slave songs “were born out of the myriad types of violence established, perpetrated, and maintained by a white power structure. To now have that violence exploited for profit by white artists and producers both embodies and perpetuates the historical exploitation and marginalization of Black populations in Quebec and the world over.”