Jazz Fest: SLĀV isn't cultural appropriation, singer Bonifassi says

Director Robert Lepage and singer Betty Bonifassi, who are teaming up for SLÃV, "a theatrical odyssey based on slave songs," as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival at L'Astral in Montreal on Wednesday, June 20, 2018.

“These songs were and are not merely an ordinary form of expressive culture,” said Charmaine Nelson, a McGill art history professor and author of the book “Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica,” who spent the past year as a visiting professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University.

“They were ways for enslaved Africans to express mourning for lost loved ones, homes and cultures under extraordinarily oppressive regimes with corporal punishment at their core.”