Way back in February I was sitting in an East Village bar with a fiction writer and an ex-Marine. Now he’s a history major. What did you do for New Year’s Eve, they asked. Went to a party some cabaret friends, I said. You have cabaret friends? Yeah. They perform at our friendly neighbourhood cabaret. We have cabaret friends too, don’t we honey? The ex-Marine is a regular comedian. Yes, that’s right, of course we do, the fiction writer picked up the thread. You know, those cabaret friends we hired to be our cabaret friends so we could say we have cabaret friends. Sure, we hang out at the cabaret all the time.
Our friendly neighbourhood cabaret is, of course, Kiss My Cabaret, hosted by Danette MacKay. And it’s on tonight!
On the bill, the crème de la crème of Montréal performers: Alexis O’Hara, Skidmore, Désirée D’Amour, Madame et Matante, Church of Harvey Christ – and very special SURPRISE out-of-town guests! By request, Gigi et Pipi will close the show with their stirring Battle Hymn – lollipops all around!
Speaking of Gigi et Pipi, the other night we dined with half the afore mentioned cabaret crème de la crème and then swooped downtown descending en masse upon the École Bourget for the opening of La Biennale de Montréal. We went to see Gigi and Pipi, and wound up running into everyone else we’d ever known in our lives along the way. We wove through the crowd on the lawn, squeezed up the front steps, and were pleased for once to have to pass the absurd bullet-proof security cubicle. Inside, Carol Pope slouched – all skinny, shiny-baddged and sinister in navy. Performing the squinty eyes of suspicious security guard boredom, she stared all the art hounds down.
Working our way through a social obstacle course of countless quick waves, big hugs, awkward exits, emotional reunions, forgotten names and about-time introductions we found and lost each other repeatedly in the hot and sweaty hallways, eventually all making our way to the hidden wonders of the easy-to-miss but not-to-be-missed tiny closed-door closet space allotted to, taken over and utterly transformed by our 2byoys, Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard, Gigi L’Amour and Pipi Douleur. We waited – the most fun I’ve ever had on a line up – with old and new and long-lost out-of-town friends, co-workers, colleagues and random art-world hangers-on and heavy-hitters. Of the later, I’d be hard pressed to say which was which. We passed the time drinking beer, taking photos of our selves and text messaging each other like a bunch of twelve year olds. And just when we were on the verge of becoming unruly, Pipi Douleur ushered into Phobophilia.
It’s a closet, a cloakroom. It’s a theatre, it’s a play, a spectacle, and a stage; it’s a dressing room, a powder room, a vanity, a secret. It’s a cramped space behind-the-scenes to be alone in when you’ve got your guard-down after-the-show. Gigi et Pipi invite us into the part of the performance we’re not supposed to see. We enter, all drab in our sweat and street clothes, and Gigi L’Amour starts in on us. With chatter and wink, flatter and suggestion, Gigi starts convincing us that we’re somewhere else, a place where disbelief is suspended, where the mundane is upended, where her eyelashes are real. Only then are we invited to climb up into the theatre in the rear. We perch on steep step seats – a jumbled audience of heads, legs and breath. We are a miniature audience; we are gigantic. And in an instant we are lost. Wandered off from the cramped attic theatre crawl space, into the fantasies of film-noir. We are specks on snowy landscapes; we chase our own ghosts, we leap and plié into the spotlight – alone at last – on our very own silver-screen-in-a-suitcase stage.
La Biennale de Montréal: http://www.ciac.ca/
Kiss My Cabaret: http://kissmycabaret.com
La Sala Rossa, 4848 boul. St. Laurent, tonight at 8PM
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