Mélanie Demers: The Art of Fleetingness

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For multidisciplinary artist Mélanie Demers, anti-racism and feminism are basic principles; her creative work is a political gesture born of esthetic intuition. To better portray the notion of togetherness, for the past 10 years she has chosen inclusive casts, with a focus on women and artists from diverse backgrounds who were previously invisibilized.

The choreographer and director now works with performers such as Stacey Désilier, Frannie Holder, Briana Lombardo, Chi Long, and Angélique Willkie. These heartfelt choices are in tune with what the audience wants to see and hear, and audience members appreciate such femininity on stage. Castings are not checkboxes for subsidies, but real encounters that create and transform the work, such as during the genesis of L’amour ou rien (2025) or Cabaret Noir (2022), which returns in February.

Prompted by the killing of George Floyd, Cabaret Noir is an intense pop-inspired pagan celebration of the concept of Blackness, fuelled by works that shaped this notion in Demers’s mind. James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Boukar Diouf, Frantz Fanon, Dany Laferrière, and Toni Morrison rub shoulders with Nina Simone, Spike Lee, Hergé and his album Tintin in the Congo. The contributing performers pick up a book and read a page they open at random, whether they come across something important or completely trivial. The order of the scenes also shifts, depending on whatever lighting, music, or DJ set is happening at the time. No show is ever the same.

Uninhibited speech

The random structure of the literary cabaret reveals the breadth of its contrasts, creating uninhibited speech in French, English, and Creole, reinventing itself each evening by adding new layers of meaning. Demers believes in the accident as a creative force. Afro-American philosopher Fred Moten believes that improvisation is at the very core of being Black—that Black people use fugitivity and fleetingness as a means of resistance and adaptability: hence jazz, dance, and athletic intelligence. The choreographer endorses this academic analysis.

The murder of George Floyd is symbolic of systemic racialism and police brutality against Afro-descendants in the United States and elsewhere. Violence is intricately linked to their history, whether institutional or internalized. Each performer of Cabaret Noir bears traces of it, even if their experiences differ. The show depicts situations of violence. Some acts are subtle, while others are challenging to deliver—or to stomach.

While waiting for a post-racist and post-feminist society, Demers is experimenting, seeking to move on from political claims and dive into the splendour and vastness of what the human soul has to offer.