Company
Elle Barbara is a Montréal-based avant-garde singer-songwriter, pin-up artist, performer and community facilitator, whose musical output alternately combines elements of sophisti-pop, jazz, soul, glam, and underground. A lover of the odd, obscure, and overlooked elements in pop music, Elle Barbara made zir name in artist-run spaces at the turn of the 2010s and has had a cult following ever since.
In recent years, Elle Barbara has centred zir efforts around trans and queer community organizing, including contributions to Montréal’s re-emerging ballroom scene as Mother of the iconic, idiosyncratic House of Barbara. The House of Barbara is a collective whose transdisciplinary practice encompasses art, activism and music. And with zir concept group Elle Barbara’s Black Space, Elle Barbara aims to centre zir Black femininity with a lineup solely made up of musicians of African descent.
Danse-Cité accompanies artists as they develop and unfold their artistic process, from the inception of an idea to its presentation before an audience. Danse-Cité is invested in self-critical and sustainable structural work to become an organization that understands power and respects the dignity and self-determination of the humans, artists, and cultural workers with whom it comes into contact, no matter their origin, ethnicity, gender, ability, size, religion, or age.
Danse-Cité supports the emergence of new authorship, a diversity of practices and backgrounds, the maturing of artistic processes as well as the meeting and integration of other disciplinary practices. Danse-Cité is developing activities that facilitate universal access to the arts.