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Meow Meow. Photo: Magnus Hastings |
with contributions by John Jarboe
“What is cabaret?”
Thank you for asking! Cabaret is a musical by Kander and Ebb that once starred Liza Minnelli. It’s a kind of table. It’s a brand of cracker that 70s suburbanites served at key parties. It’s an indulgence, a secret, a cult, a radical experiment in community building, a trust exercise between performer and audience. An ephemeral queering of traditional performance modes. It’s an artform whose audience is living and getting younger.
Even as audiences get younger, the world around them seems to be collapsing. I used to think of cabaret as a place of beginnings, but more and more I see it as a place of endings or, really, of post-endings. Post-narrative, post-theatrical, post-pretension, post-perfection. At its most basic level, cabaret is a performer sitting metaphorically (or literally) in your lap sharing their virtuosity, vulnerability, and some laughs. Cabaret began on the site of the failed Paris Commune uprising and has a history of flourishing as people who don’t fit into the mainstream struggle: in post WWI Germany, in Harlem during the Renaissance, in Midtown during McCarthyism, and downtown post 9/11. As Brecht, a hanger-on of the Weimar cabaret scene, said: “In the dark times. Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” When everything else has fallen away, we’ll still be huddling around a piano with someone to help us laugh through tears and sing songs that touch us in deep and unknowable ways.
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BAM holiday card featuring Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives. |
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Classic BAM holiday card. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives.
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A previous BAM holiday celebration: Judith Owen & Harry Shearer's Christmas Without Tears, 2015. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives. |
Meow Meow (in A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show, Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, Dec 12—14) identifies not as a cabaret artist, but as a post post-modern diva. When she demands help from her audience—usually men—with the air of a put-upon hostess who is making do with slightly disappointing dinner guests, she unapologetically commands the room in a way women are rarely allowed. We are there to serve her and the show and in doing so, we become an ad hoc community. We talk through her, and then we talk to each other (heaven forbid: actually talking with strangers!). In the outside world where leaders are almost always male and straight, cabaret gives us a glimpse at other options. In the Third Reich, Goebbels was so aware of the disruptive power of the host that he banned the use of emcees late in the 1930s, perhaps sensing that people might unconsciously make associations between the little cabaret dictators (who were frequently women and/or Jewish) and the big one heading the government. He effectively killed cabaret without ever banning it outright—once the emcee was gone, so was the appeal.
At a time of year filled with attempts to find light in the darkness, and rife with opportunities to celebrate idols from Santa to Mariah, many contemporary artists like Meow Meow embrace the holiday show. You can see the appeal: spend a night with chosen family instead of your actual family. Whether seeking an escape from December drear or Yuletide cheer, you can find it in this show which both sends up and engages earnestly with the trappings of traditional holiday fare. Surrender your will to your hostess for the evening, sip a cocktail or two, maybe make a new friend. And most of all, enjoy it while it lasts.
Sally Ollove is a freelance dramaturg who splits her time between Seattle where she lives and Philadelphia, where she is the Associate Artistic Director of the Bearded Ladies Cabaret.
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