Faced with 20 singers who look in your direction and sing in unison the worst insults on earth, you really don’t lead much. But if nothing can happen to you here, in the shelter of a Parisian rehearsal room, this shower of insanity has been part of daily life for Safia Nolin since her sudden fame almost ten years ago, when Quebec was swooning for the debut album from this loud-mouthed folk singer. Nominated in 2016 in five categories at the Adisq gala (Quebec equivalent of our Victoires) including those of revelation of the year and video of the year which she would win, Safia Nolin was the subject of controversy as virulent as it is anachronistic and full of misogyny on his clothing – jeans, t-shirt – and his level of language – three “fucks” recorded – during the award ceremony. The artist responded with a panache via the progressive web media Urbaniathe kickoff of a stormy relationship between the young woman without filter and public opinion, rekindled in 2020 when Safia Nolin accused reality TV candidate and host Maripier Morin of sexual assault. Fat queer singer versus filigree figure of daddy’s TV: a clash of cultures which increased the messages of insults against Nolin, well beyond social networks since hateful graffiti flourished on the walls of Montreal.
Dizzying disgust
This is the raw material from which Safia Nolin and director Philippe Cyr drew to design Monitored and punishedan intense musical show created during the Montreal TransAmériques festival in May 2024 and which is being performed for the first time in France. The singer has an alter ego at her side on stage, the actress Debbie Lynch-White, and both, although equally charismatic and corpulent, at first appear tiny compared to the twenty or so singers who overlook them on the stands. Hooded at the start of the show, the crowd reveals their faces as they sing, almost discontinuously for an hour and a half, texts woven from several hundred (!) private messages and public comments on online media.
We know, to sometimes pay the price, the inventiveness of trolls, fans outraged that their idol is being attacked and other deranged harassers, but the disgust of the insults to Nolin is dizzying. The smallest details of his physique, weight, hair, and everything that makes up his nature, his Algerian origins, his homosexuality are attacked, in a variety of styles that range from invective to fantasies of torture and even threats of death – we will not cite any of these comments, the company’s wish to avoid giving them back a place in the public space. After a first long segment where the protagonist lets this flow of shit flow over her, sitting on the ground facing the choir, she and her double come alive to this penetrating sound scene, doing each other good, massage, bathe, eat pasta, in a posture of defiance or denial we cannot say enough, before appropriating the stinking material and taking the insults into their mouths in an exuberant Broadway-style number.
“Trash radio excerpts”
Monday evening took place the first joint rehearsal of professional choristers from Quebec and those, amateurs, recruited in Ménilmontant and trained at the Plateaux sauvage by the multidisciplinary artist Gérald Kurdian. Philippe Cyr tells us to see the piece as “an exercise in positive contamination, in the sense that first we see the extent of the comments made, and then we are in an exercise of transformation and solidarity”the recruitment of local choristers being a continuation of this gesture for him. It was in 2019 that he collaborated for the first time with Safia Nolin to stage a concert at the Francofolies de Montréal, the biggest of his life, free, in front of 20,000 people, and in which they already played with her image and the criticism against her: replaced on stage by a drag queen, hooded in a duet with Pomme, she also appeared naked on screens, in videos “very Beyoncé”, hair in the wind “with rose petals”… Safia is messing around: “It was a damn good show!” Philippe : “We had a lot of fun with the waiting horizons, playing “we come to see Safia but we don’t see her”»…
Above all, she had decided to broadcast during this concert an extract from a program on the very right-wing Radio “I had the desire to make what was happening to me concrete. People knew I was being insulted, but not to this extent. It was a golden opportunity to speak to as many people as possible, especially since it was a free concert, therefore also open to people not necessarily on my side.” Philippe, who was present, says: “People were paralyzed at first, and then they started booing in solidarity with Safia, it was pretty crazy to experience it together with so many people. This idea from Safia, to broadcast these trash radio excerpts, was the spark plug, the premise of a conversation on all the subjects that are found today in Monitored and punished.»
“I no longer pay attention to the words”
Foucault’s essay which inspires the title of the show, Monitor and punish – Birth of the prison (1975), opens with the raw transcription of three pages of the minutes of an execution in 1757, a document which relates with surgical precision all the details of the torture of a parricide condemned to be tormented then dismembered in public . The perversion of certain abuses imagined by the online harassers of the young Quebec singer is not without arousing the same feeling of nausea – although the rather consonant harmonies of the choir’s song (composed by Vincent Legault) create a distance with the material first. Despite this, during the Monday rehearsal where the amateur choristers met Safia Nolin for the first time, the latter and her double did not spare a clarification: “We know that it is a difficult, very violent matter, explains Debbie Lynch-White to the singers. While creating the show, we were overwhelmed, we cried a lot. […] But these words, we go very well with them, it’s correct. Don’t feel bad for singing that to us.” And Nolin adds: “It doesn’t feel the same to me as when I received them, so know that there is no discomfort. I can understand if it’s not obvious, but don’t stress! Go for it !” During rehearsal, while the chorus chants horrors, she quietly slumps on a sofa and reads a Haruki Murakami or plays Zelda on his phone. “We get used to it! I no longer pay attention to the lyrics, they have become like popular songs: I know them by heart and I no longer dwell on the meaning.
For Philippe Cyr, “the way Safia assumes her identity confronts people with something revolutionary. We look at it, we comment on it, we constrain it, we punish it for what it is. What she experiences is a form of social coercion. This resonates very strongly with Foucault and the dynamic of the monitored-supervisor that he describes based on the prison of [Jeremy] Bentham. […] Feminizing the title of his essay makes sense because the majority of these insults have in common that they are misogynistic. Himself a victim of school bullying as a child (“I was called a faggot at 11”) identifies “very personally” to what the singer is experiencing. “It gives me the energy to go out to bat [au front] !» Frank in her speeches, Safia Nolin has until now been accustomed to folk music full of poetry, but realizes: “It makes me think about a lot of things about my way of creating. I want less to encrypt things, to camouflage the point, I want it to be more direct. My music was zero politics; there, it makes me want to explore these areas.” To continue to stand up to idiots like those who were happy this summer when their van caught fire. “There are comments like: I wish it would burn. The simple fact that I exist is already too much for these people.”
