The Origins of Black Theatre in Montreal

Abstract

Montreal’s early experiences of Black theatre go back to the minstrel shows of the 1850s at the Odd Fellow’s Hall and the Garrick Club Theatre. These shows seldom involved Black artists. The companies consisted of white performers, who painted their faces black to adopt the facial traits of the Black performer. These minstrel shows presented caricatures of Blacks, in an extremely racist and demeaning light. In 1851, a Black group, called the Real Ethiopian Serenaders from Philadelphia, added to this buffoonery and the demeaning of Blacks, through its Shaker burlesque act. Garry Collison writes that parodies like the [Real] Ethiopian Serenaders’ “Shaker Burlesque” or the standard comic lecturer who spouted gibberish “played flagrantly to the white racist beliefs in the intellectual inferiority of blacks” (Collison 180). Far from educating its audiences as to the social value of Blacks and Black culture, the shows served to implant images of Blacks as childlike, of low intellectual capacity, and incapable of being assimilated into white society and civilization; as capable merely of a clownish, clumsy imitation of white culture (Collison 180). The minstrel shows continued to be a very popular form of theatrical entertainment throughout the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Their racist social content received very little critical disapproval in the press of the time. In fact, historian Robin Winks considers this to be one of the principal instruments by which Canadians had, by the end of the nineteenth century, learned to be racist in their perception of and attitudes towards Blacks. It took approximately eighty years, after the 1851 appearance of the Ethiopian Serenaders at the Royal Theatre, before we began to see the emergence in Montreal of the social, political and economic conditions from which a theatre movement initiated by Blacks, for Black expression, development and pride could take root.