THE SELF-LOVE CABARET: L’AMOUR SE CONJUGUE À LA PREMIÈRE PERSONNE

The Self-Love Cabaret: l’amour se conjugue à la première personne (2013-17) is an annual performance night curated by Kama La Mackerel, and featuring emerging and established Montreal-based Queer and Trans, People of Colour (QTPOC) artists.

As yet another February 14th approaches, as images of coupledom dominate our day-to-day living, as we rush online to find ourselves a last-minute date with whom to shrug off the mid-February cold, as we get bombarded with images of couples-couples-couples and we feel the pressure for chocolates, candle-light, and red-red-red roses and red-red-red wine to celebrate the other, “The Self-Love Cabaret: l’amour se conjugue à la première personne,” is a night to celebrate self-love and to centre the relationship to self. 

Combining different genres including spoken word, story-telling, live performance, burlesque, video work, music and new media, the artists programmed perform their love of self, narrating inter-subjectivities through ancestral, personal and political imagery. Artists are invited to blur the lines across media, to be daring, and to bring forth raw and honest expressions of their selves. The representation of the queer, trans and racialized body, in the cultural space of The Self-Love Cabaret, affirms the self-determination of QTBIPOC communities, and foreshadow the imperative to love, the right to self-love.

The Self-Love Cabaret is a platform that also challenges hetero- and homo-normative ideals that celebrate coupledom and bestow privileges on couples that reinforce discriminative nationalist structures. The performers actively protest consumerist and capitalist characteristics of Valentine’s day offering a critique of the dominant representation of love as commodity.

Throughout the years, The Self-Love Cabaret has become an annual rendez-vous that showcases the most talented queer and trans artists of colour of the Montréal art and performance scenes. 

Curated and hosted by Kama La Mackerel, in 2014, the artists featured in the Self-Love Cabaret were:

Ricky Leach
Lilz
Jacqueline Van de Geer
Mr Business Casualty
Galen Hartley
Dot Dot Dot
Lady Sin Trayda
Gigi Marx
Tranna Wintour
Shaun Hunter-McLean

Curated and hosted by Kama La Mackerel, in 2013, the artists featured in the Self-Love Cabaret were:

Lady Sin Trayda
Jean-François St-Arnault
The Femme Maggots
Esmond on Clarinet
La Kata Compagnie
Zara Ahmed
Elisha Lim 
Maia Iotzova