A Crowd of Shadows: Performances, Protests, Streets and Stages

Abstract

Using performance and visual studies methodologies, this article responds to the interwoven and contextually specific happenings of the pandemic and histories of Black consciousness and antiblackness in Montreal’s theatres. In doing so, it creates parallels between past and present events as surrogates, ghostings, or performative encounters of Black experiences on theatrical stages in a white Quebecois landscape. It argues that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were a product of a longstanding local cultural economy of obfuscated antiblackness, an embodied, spatially ingrained, and reinforced set of historical paradigms that have been present in Quebecois life and more specifically on Montreal stages for centuries. The architecture of Montreal theatre, its actors, and spectres of recent events are theoretically framed as both racism and resistance, antiblackness and forms of Black consciousness, a view onto the past from the present, and a repository of performances, living archives, and embodied collective imaginaries.