It’s not cultural appropriation: Bonifassi
Singer of slave songs says all cultures ‘suffer the same’
Betty Bonifassi was on edge on Friday.
“I’m so scared,” she confided. “It’s something very big for me, what’s happening. It’s the culmination of years of work. I’m nervous. I want people to like it, and understand what we tried to express.”
Bonifassi realizes this is not a given. She is the lead vocalist of the most popular ticketed show at the 39th Montreal International Jazz Festival. SLĀV, “a theatrical odyssey based on slave songs,” directed by Quebec theatre/Cirque du Soleil luminary Robert Lepage, runs until July 14 at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. The first five nights are sold out. In all, more than 8,000 tickets have been sold for 16 performances.
Bonifassi came to the director with 200 pages of research and ideas, which he synthesized into a single narrative thread. SLĀV, five years in the making, follows a young black woman on a voyage of discovery.
“That’s the grandeur of his genius of mise-en-scène,” she said. “He wanted to bring this character to the source.”
But at the heart of SLĀV — one of the key selling points of the show — is Bonifassi, who is white, singing black slave songs, under the prestigious direction of Lepage, who is also white. And that’s where things get complicated.
In November, I wrote a column asking whether Bonifassi should be singing songs created by and recounting the experiences of black slaves.
“These songs were and are not merely an ordinary form of expressive culture,” said Charmaine Nelson, a McGill art history professor and author of the book Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, who spent the past year as a visiting professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University.
“They were ways for enslaved Africans to express mourning for lost loved ones, homes and cultures under extraordinarily oppressive regimes with corporal punishment at their core.”
Bonifassi rejects the notion that by performing these songs she could be seen as engaging in cultural appropriation. She has been singing slave songs for more than 15 years, rising to prominence as a guest vocalist for Montreal party maestro DJ Champion. She released two solo albums since 2014, featuring reworked slave songs and black work songs originally recorded in the 1930s by American ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax.
In SLĀV, she and Lepage explore the history of slavery, oppression, migration and mass incarceration.
Bonifassi spoke of her mother’s background as a Serbian immigrant from the former Yugoslavia; of the life education she received from Congolese, Malian and Senegalese friends she made at university in Nice, France; of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad; of America’s historical subjugation of Irish, Chinese and other immigrants; and of modern-day sweatshops in Asia.
“I don’t feel badly at all,” she said. “I’m doing this with such a big heart, dignity, precision and research. I waited a long time to find the right way to make this work. I don’t see colour; to me, it doesn’t exist, physically or in music.
“People talk about whites taking black songs. Uniting two colours is modern. We don’t talk about black and white in the show. We talk about human pain, experienced together. All cultures and ethnicities suffer the same.”
Asked what message she and Lepage hope to convey in SLĀV, Bonifassi replied: “We want to open a dialogue. … What I wanted profoundly was to bring people together, to create a show where we feel united, no matter who is talking, where there is no more colour or origin.”
McGill’s Nelson warns of the danger in taking colour out of the equation, and in the theory we are living in a post-racial society.
“The jazz festival’s desire to spotlight a white singer and producer, however accomplished,” Nelson said, “is part of a larger and ongoing problem of a Canadian desire to whitewash certain deeply troubling colonial histories. This collective amnesia goes hand-in-hand with a rhetoric of colour blindness which allows … institutions to withhold certain opportunities from black Canadians and other black people.”
Though hesitant to pronounce herself on SLĀV’s merits before seeing the show, Nelson had reservations about the premise.
“My initial feeling,” she said, “is that, regardless of the calibre and reputation of the singer, the jazz festival should have extended such an opportunity first to a black singer and more specifically one whose ancestry is rooted in transatlantic slavery.”
AT A GLANCE: The Montreal International Jazz Festival presents SLĀV, through July 14 at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Tickets cost $60.50 to $90.50, available at montrealjazzfest.com