The Visibility Paradox of Afrodescendant Women in the Performing Arts

By Elina Timsit

Montreal bubbles. Montreal teems. Montreal vibrates.

Quebec’s economic capital celebrates the performing arts, 365 days a year.

Afrodescendant women artists are active contributors to this dynamism. Singing, theatre, literary performance, music, comedy. They inhabit stages — but as shadow puppets of a culture they nonetheless animate, nourish, and fatten.

Quebecois, they get labelled “world music”; from the diaspora, they’re called “exotic” — despite a professional background as rich as it is eclectic. They oscillate, then, between a here and an elsewhere that some have never even visited.

They exist… as long as the word “afro” is written on the poster or the door.

They remain forever the other, a paradox whose talents are matched only by the lack of visibility and recognition they receive.

Conquering the Stage

Dozens of festivals — Nuits d’Afrique, Vues d’Afrique, AfroMonde, AfroUrbain — along with cultural organizations and internationally recognized artists, whether immigrants or Canadian-born, like Rhodnie Désir or Djely Tapa, all contribute to Quebec’s artistic richness and vibrancy.

And yet, this dynamism can only flourish by conforming to certain expectations. The most common: performances with an imposed “ethnic” flavour, or roles that map onto the three archetypes of the Black woman: the prostitute (Jezebel), the mother (Madonna), or the Angry Black Woman.¹ But within these shackles, creativity and agency cannot exist… During the Afrocreative #3 conversation between Pilou, a Quebec artist, and Noumoucounda Cissoko, a Senegalese musician and griot, as well as in an interview with Laeticia Mogène – emerging professional dancer and member of the improv collective Minorité Risible – this reality rings out painfully.

Laeticia was born and trained in contemporary dance in Quebec, then at the Juste Debout School in Paris, where she was often the only racialized student in her classes. As she puts it: “We’re not training artists, we’re training molds, copycats of what’s expected as the vision of contemporary dance.” She adds that for Black women performing artists, the racial filter comes layered with a sexist one: the sadly famous misogynoir. Notably, Moya Bailey² theorized this concept through her research on Hip-hop.

From Here, Yet from Elsewhere

“I’m like a bug in the matrix. This hybridity wasn’t supposed to happen. […] Integration doesn’t exist. […] We like seeing Black people with Black people, but from a distance. […] I’m in a kind of multiverse, and every so often three or four dimensions come crashing into each other.”

— Laeticia Mogène

As a society — whether on the side of public institutions or that of audiences — we struggle to acknowledge our tendency to hold a uniform vision of “Black people,” and how, in doing so, we erase the diversity of their realities.

Afrodescendant women artists born or raised in Quebec consequently disappear into a blind spot. This loneliness and this acculturation make them even more vulnerable to systemic invisibilization. Several Conseil des Arts de Montréal reports³ reflect this reality.

For Géraldine Le Chêne, Executive Director of the Vues d’Afrique festival for four decades, the glass ceiling is even more insidious: “It often comes down to connections. You have to be in a database or on a contact list to stand a chance of being chosen.”

Having to build their own spaces ostracizes these artists, who find themselves forced to construct their own tables — with toothpicks — without access to the main feast. We seem to favour the “trend” over creation in all its complexity and discoverability.

Recognition, but on the Cheap

When talent is finally recognized, the road doesn’t necessarily clear of obstacles. Funding falls short, even when a project has been evaluated as 100% satisfactory — as Laeticia experienced firsthand. A grant denied and then finally granted is only awarded thanks to a budget surplus… the leftovers, so to speak. Stepping outside the codes of whiteness and masculinity seems to slow access to funding — even though granting bodies claim to value innovation and a plurality of voices.

The Fabienne Colas Foundation and the Observatory of Black Communities document that Black artists are the most marginalized and underserved group within Canada’s artistic community.⁴

Catherine Caisse, during the Afrocreative #3 conversation, attributes this to a lack of education, which keeps administrators in ignorance and afraid of stepping off the beaten path.

This dissonance ends up encouraging assimilation — or, conversely, an over-the-top exoticism — at the expense of authenticity. Their absence from the decision-making table, and the scarcity of economic levers, exhaust and discourage even the most determined.

Our Afrodescendant women performing artists are born of fusion, and they let us experiment outside our comfort zone. And perhaps that’s exactly where the heart of Art lies: taking us elsewhere while making us feel at home, blurring our borders, making the new familiar. Could we imagine spaces for collective creation, more diverse sources of recommendation, simpler professional pathways — and above all, ways of giving our artists real power to create and act on their own art?

It seems clear that our Afrodescendant women performing artists hold the perfect recipe for this cultural kaleidoscope. It’s up to us — audiences and organizations alike — to find the courage to engage with it, without freezing in the face of the unknown.

References

• Afrocreative #3 — Conversation between Pilou (Quebec) and Noumoucounda (Senegal): Creating Differently, Together. Wednesday, March 18, 2026 — online. Organized by Mangrove and Beam.
• Canada Council for the Arts. 2024. What Grant Programs Fund. conseildesarts.ca
• La Presse. June 2020. After Words, Black Artists Await Action. lapresse.ca
• Institut de recherche sur l’intégration professionnelle des immigrants. May 2022. Ethnocultural Diversity in Quebec’s Arts Sector: Trajectories, Barriers, and Strategies. iripi.ca
• Montréal Campus. March 2021. Afro-Quebec Art: A Vector of Identity Affirmation. montrealcampus.ca
• La Presse. May 2021. One Year After George Floyd — Creating Against All Odds. lapresse.ca

Notes

1. La Presse / Radio-Canada. Février 2023. Mois de l’histoire des Noirs : Déconstruire les stéréotypes de la femme noire — Le mythe de la femme noire, documentaire d’Ayana O’Shun. lapresse.ca
   Politika. 2024. Hypersexualisation des corps afrodescendants dans l’industrie musicale contemporaine. politika.io ↩
2. Moya Bailey, 2013. Souls: A critical Journal of Black politics, culture and society. Vol. 15, Issue 4: Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics in Dubai and Brazil ↩
3. Journals OpenEdition. 2021. L’évitement comme politique de gestion des débats au Conseil des arts du Canada : le cas de l’appropriation culturelle et du racisme systémique. journals.openedition.org/ethiquepublique ↩
4. Sondage Léger dans le cadre de l’étude Portrait des jeunes des communautés noires du Québec (PJCN). 2025. https://sdesj.org/pjcnsondage2/ p.38-46
   Fondation Fabienne Colas / Fondu au Noir. Juillet 2020. Le Fonds National pour les Arts Blacks. fonduaunoir.ca ↩

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Echoes of Inclusion is funded by the Government of Canada – Canadian Heritage.