Two recent works offer different responses to the last question: Fredy<\/em>, a play written by Annabel Soutar, directed by Marc Beaupr\u00e9, and premiered at La Licorne (Montr\u00e9al) in 2016, and Black and Blue Matters\u200a\u2014\u200aTrack 1: No One Gives a F**k About a Cop<\/em>, a performance written by Omari Newton, directed by Diane Roberts, and presented in Parc Vinet (Montr\u00e9al) in July 2021. Taking divergent approaches to how they relate to the communities whose stories they portray\u200a\u2014\u200ain this case, the same story: the murder of a racialized young man by a white police officer\u200a\u2014\u200athe works activate two ways of thinking about how art gets integrated into its social context. In Fredy<\/em>, the context acts as a frame enclosing how one sees and understands what is being represented; in No One Gives a F**k<\/em>, the context becomes the fertile soil out of which the practice emerges, which makes it possible and to which it will eventually return and contribute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soutar, the founder of the theatre company Porte Parole (J\u2019aime Hydro<\/em>, Sexy B\u00e9ton<\/em>), has become known for what is described as \u201cverbatim theatre,\u201d a form of documentary theatre in which the story and dialogue are based on journalistic research. For Fredy<\/em>, Soutar wanted to present the results of her investigation into the tragic death of Fredy Villanueva and the judicial, political, and media processes that followed. Villanueva, an eighteen-year-old man of Honduran origin, was shot and killed in 2008 by white police officer Jean-Loup Lapointe in a park in Montr\u00e9al-Nord, even though neither he nor the other young people Soutar was trying to offer not her view of the events but that of the protagonists by taking up their words as they were reported in the media, public inquiry reports, and court transcripts. Her intention was to \u201cpresent the whole story,\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Sara Dion, \u201cLe partage d\u2019Annabel Soutar,\u201d Jeu<\/em>, no. 156 (2015): 86 (our translation).<\/span>\u2014\u200athat is, the points of view of both the police officers and Fredy\u2019s family and friends. Yet the Villanueva family, after a reluctant and difficult initial collaboration, later withdrew from the project entirely and demanded the cancellation of a second series of performances, announced for 2017 and 2018.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Caroline Montpetit, \u201c\u2018Fredy\u2019 envers et contre tous,\u201d Le Devoir<\/em>, December 16, 2017, accessible online.<\/span> The victim\u2019s mother, Lilian Madrid Villanueva, accused the playwright of exploiting her family\u2019s tragedy without respecting her wishes. Out of solidarity, the actors Ricardo Lamour and Solo Fug\u00e8re withdrew from the production, denouncing the \u201cimbalance of power\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Robert Everett-Green, \u201cQuebec Play Fredy Raises Questions About Power and Story Ownership,\u201d The Globe & Mail<\/em>, November 11, 2016, accessible online.<\/span> and \u201ctheft of someone else\u2019s words.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Montpetit, \u201c\u2018Fredy\u2019 envers et contre tous\u201d (our translation).<\/span> The municipal police force, the Service de police de la Ville de Montr\u00e9al, never wanted to collaborate on the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soutar nevertheless chose to continue mounting the performances, pleading the expectations of another collectivity separate from the groups who had experienced this tragedy\u200a\u2014\u200athe public: \u201cWe had waiting lists of people who wanted to see the play. We had to remount it … It\u2019s important to reach the public,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> she said. Aside from the communities that were directly implicated in the events and had to suffer the violence and repercussions, there was supposedly another larger, homogeneous, undifferentiated, and neutral community\u200a\u2014\u200aa community that had not yet been \u201creached\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athat Soutar wanted to address first and foremost: the art public. Just like the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy tasked with conveying the voice of the social body onstage, \u201cthe public\u201d was called upon to be the ultimate judge of the events\u200a\u2014\u200aas much of Fredy Villanueva\u2019s death as of the play itself and its author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soutar\u2019s approach banks on an unbiased dialogue and the ability to listen to divergent positions, the only attitudes presumed capable of bringing out the truth: \u201cAre we able to put aside our fears and prejudices to speak candidly about his death?\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - \u201cFredy by Annabel Soutar,\u201d Porte Parole, porteparole.org\/en\/plays\/fredy\/.<\/span> Porte Parole asks on the project\u2019s webpage. The bias for something that is purported to exist objectively (the truth) and the wager on each individual\u2019s ability to discover this truth through a combination of information and sound judgment make it possible to treat the experiences (and trauma) of certain communities as material: they are perceived as shards of a larger, more objective, and thus more valid, reality. The communities involved are likewise considered to be parts of a greater whole (society), which, due to its aggregating and intersubjective qualities, is also given greater value. This is a fundamental idea of liberal thought, inherited from European modernity: society gains knowledge and wisdom through the confrontation of contradictory opinions, among which a reasonable individual is able to select the good from the not-as-good7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - An idea developed in particular by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty<\/em> (1859).<\/span>\u2014\u200aa line of thought that Black feminist theories and cultural studies,8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - These two theoretical bodies of work both valorize the decentring of the subject and the position of marginality as a means of calling into question the invisible assumptions influencing the classical scientific process. In these critical theories, the \u201ctruth\u201d that Soutar ostensibly seeks appears as an ideological production that no \u201cneutral\u201d point of view could ever access.<\/span> among others, have tried to deconstruct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Five years after Fredy<\/em>, the Black Theatre Workshop also broached the subject of the murder of racialized people by white police officers. No One Gives a F**k<\/em>, likewise partially inspired by the tragedy in Montr\u00e9al-Nord, stages the fictional trial of white police officer David Harrison (Troy Slocum) who shot black teenager Sammir Frederique (Justin Johnson) nine times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Described as a \u201csatirical Hip Hop musical\u201d and presented in a park in Little Burgundy (a historically Black neighbourhood in Montr\u00e9al), the fifteen-minute performance is an excerpt of a much longer work that will be produced in winter 2022. The musical takes the form of a rap battle between the two protagonists, and the turn of phrase in the title appears both as the police officer\u2019s complaint (\u201cno one supports us\u201d) and as a protest statement by those who would like collective and institutional empathy to momentarily turn away from the defenders of order to focus on those who suffer from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The performance took place near the home plate of the baseball diamond in Parc Vinet, in front of the wire fencing protecting the bleachers. Yet the performance was oriented not toward the bleachers but toward the field, where the public was invited to gather. Standing in the sand, audience members faced an arrangement of white blocks\u200a\u2014\u200ahalf-podiums, half-pedestals. Flanked by two projection screens on either side and the stand of the DJ (Godfather D) at the back, the public was placed literally in the arena<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diverse voices, drawn from news reports, resonated against a background of hypnotic low-bass music. We recognized that of Qu\u00e9bec Premier Fran\u00e7ois Legault, who claimed (in English), \u201cThere is no systemic racism in Qu\u00e9bec.\u201d Then, a moving, shimmering, brown form took up position on the highest pedestal, while the defendant and the victim settled on either side, in a configuration evoking a court of law. The screens showed computer-generated images (the hands, then the head, of a Black woman\u200a\u2014\u200aplayed by Nindy Banks\u200a\u2014\u200aslowly dancing against an ethereal background) and video portraits of Black or racialized people taken in public spaces around the city. Looking directly into the camera with patient eyes, they electrified the air by their very presence or by the words printed on their clothes or signs: \u201cLand back now,\u201d \u201cAm I next?\u201d and \u201cBlack Lives Matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A woman\u2019s voice (Tali Taliwah) spoke out: \u201cWelcome to the Oppressed People\u2019s court.\u201d The moving form was embodied by a woman of African descent (a Coligny), wearing a golden cape and Nefertiti headdress, at once a royal figure and the incarnation of Black Justice. Her voice resumed: \u201cWhite people! Raise your right fist in the air and repeat after me: I acknowledge and reject white supremacy! I will shut my ass up and listen with humility and patience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The police officer and the victim rapped their respective arguments, the former criticizing the naivet\u00e9 of the Defund the Police movement, the latter reciting the names of black people killed by police. Speaking again after dancing a solo of slow, sweeping movements, the woman-justice closed the performance with an injunction addressed to the (white) public\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cDeclare what side you\u2019re on\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200abefore turning her back to it. It was an injunction to join the political battle, an unexpected response to Soutar and her \u201cobjective\u201d theatre, and a backhand shot at a judicial system based on the principle of steering clear of politics (even if only in an illusory manner).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Contrary to modern ideology, which claims the existence of a truth that can be discovered through objective reasoning, the proposed approach is resolutely situated. It recognizes the fact that neutrality, for some members of the larger social body, goes hand in hand with erasure and death9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Fred Moten shows how the commodification of the Black body, in capitalist economy, has legitimized its depreciation: white \u201cobjectivity\u201d is inseparable from the negation of a part of humanity\u2019s value. By making the voice of Black people\u200a\u2014\u200athe voice of the \u201cobject\u201d deemed voiceless\u200a\u2014\u200aresonate, Black performance resists this commodification. On the question of the (non-)value of the Black body in capitalist economy, see also David Marriott, \u201cOn Decadence: Bling Bling,\u201d E-flux Journal<\/em>, no. 79 (February 2017), accessible online. <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roberts and Newton have a commitment, both in their work as artists and beyond, to communities of African descent of which they are members. They call on us\u200a\u2014\u200athe public and, in particular, the white public\u200a\u2014\u200ato take sides in a context in which the presumed neutrality of the judicial system has already proved its inability to equitably accommodate racialized subjects or make police officers accountable.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In contrast to the public community that had not yet been \u201creached,\u201d on behalf of which and to which Soutar speaks, Roberts and Newton speak from their roots in a community that has been historically \u201creached\u201d: marked in its flesh by the continual inscription of white violence.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - In the view of Hortense J. Spillers, it was the reduction of the Black body to the state of flesh that made possible its exploitation in the economy of slavery\u200a\u2014\u200aand which still makes possible today its wanton murder. See \u201cMama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,\u201d Diacritics<\/em> 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64\u200a\u2014\u200a81.<\/span> Here, the act of putting justice back into the hands of a Black court\u200a\u2014\u200aand giving voice to murdered flesh in a rap battle\u200a\u2014\u200aseems to act less like a call to \u201cdiscover the truth\u201d and more like a call to make visible: make the erasure visible, give the \u201cflesh\u201d back its humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not to say that No One Gives a F**k<\/em> refuses to make history heard in all its complexity. It invites us to a battle between the words of the police officer and those of the man he killed. As Newton explains, \u201cI try as much as I can to make a balanced argument explaining the grievances of both sides.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Jim Burke, \u201cBlack Theatre Workshop Returns with Provocative Black and Blue Matters,\u201d The Montreal Gazette<\/em>, July 23, 2021, accessible online.<\/span> Moreover, the performance doesn\u2019t pronounce a verdict on the murder itself: the verdict is the call made to the public to stop being neutral and immune to the struggles that actually take place and that Sammir Frederique (a fictional character), Fredy Villanueva, and members of their communities cannot escape. It is not a verdict on Harrison\u2019s act, but on a larger collectivity\u2019s\u200a\u2014\u200awhite society\u200a\u2014\u200aand art\u2019s unwillingness to take action, as it skims over politics without bothering to dive in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roberts and Newton, like Soutar, address, through a clash of voices, the complexity of social tensions that allow \u201cblue\u201d bodies to decimate (most often with impunity) Black bodies. Soutar launches on a quest for an objective narrative that the collectivity (exemplarily represented by the public) can seize in order to find the source of reconciliation. In No One Gives a F**k<\/em>, there won\u2019t be any reconciliation without politics, without a truth-telling call to arms\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, taking a risk by speaking.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - In \u201cDiscourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia\u201d (foucault.info\/parrhesia\/; see also journals.openedition.org\/anabases\/3956#bodyftn5, notes 5 and 7), Michel Foucault unpacks the concept of parrhesia<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200afree speech or truth-telling\u200a\u2014\u200awhich is presented as a political necessity for the Greek thinkers of Antiquity. Using parrhesia<\/em> means exposing the other to criticism, which always entails a risk for the speaker. Over time, parrhesia<\/em> is itself subject to an evolution in critical thought, which raises the question \u201cWho<\/em> can express this truth-telling?\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa question that is at the core of the works discussed in this article.<\/span> Fredy <\/em>asks the public to be the judge, a central figure of the liberal system, in which law tends to replace politics.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - See, for example, Jean-Fabien Spitz, La libert\u00e9 politique : Essai de g\u00e9n\u00e9alogie conceptuelle<\/em> (Paris: Presses universitaires de France\/L\u00e9viathan, 1995).<\/span> By acknowledging the failure of the judicial system and the necessity (at the very least) of reforming its institutions, No One Gives a F**k <\/em>calls on the public to become the actor of change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fredy<\/em> and No One Gives a F**k<\/em> represent two ways of conceptualizing collectivity: in one, the community is united in its faith in justice; in the other, it will exist only through future common action. The works also offer two visions of creation as a process embedded in community. In one, the artist and the public are held above creation, as though standing on an overhang, and art brings the hope of truth to be discovered by and for oneself\u200a\u2014\u200apossibly because Soutar, just like the (mostly white) public she addresses, has not herself been \u201creached,\u201d marked in her flesh by the events she recounts, and she therefore seeks in the exercise of reason a means of accessing them. In the other, the artists ask the public to stand with them in the loose, hot flesh of slippery sand, in a vision of collectivity in which there is no overhang, not for the police, not for the people murdered, not for those whom the bullets don\u2019t reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\nFredy<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
he was with at the time were armed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_BRUNETTE_FREDY_RGB_03-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_BRUNETTE_FREDY_RGB_04-C-scaled.jpg\")
Fredy, <\/em>performance views, Th\u00e9\u00e2tre La Licorne, Montr\u00e9al, 2016.
Photo : Maxime C\u00f4t\u00e9, courtesy of Th\u00e9\u00e2tre Porte Parole<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nNo One Gives a F**k About a Cop<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_BRUNETTE_NO-ONE-GIVES-A-FK_RGB_04-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/104-DO02-IM-brunette-no-one-gives-a-Fk_01.jpg\")
Black and Blue Matters Track 1: No One Gives a F**k About a Cop<\/em>, performance views, parc Vinet, Montr\u00e9al, 2021. Pr\u00e9sented by National Arts Centre, Grand Acts of Theatre.
Script and direction : Diane Roberts, lyrics and concept : Omari Newton, casting : Justin Johnson, Troy Slocum, Jaleesa Coligny, sound : Troy Slocum, choreography : Alexandra “Spicey” Land\u00e9, costume : Nalo Soyini Bruce, video production : George Allister, projection : Patrick Boivin, lighting : Tim Rodrigues. Photos : Andr\u00e9e Lanthier, courtesy of Black Theatre Workshop Production<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_BRUNETTE_NO-ONE-GIVES-A-FK_RGB_05-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nStanding in the Sand<\/h2>\n\n\n\n