Puppeteer Franck Sylvestre: Performers White Audiences Love
During Black History Month in 2023, Montreal-based artist Franck Sylvestre performed a puppet show geared toward Black children. The show included a puppet named “Max” who appeared with coal black skin, jagged teeth, bright red lips, wide eyes, and an ape-like nose.
Many Black community organizations in Montreal publicly denounced Sylvestre and his puppet, noting that his act was reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows.
The play, L’incroyable secret de barbe noire — French for The Incredible Secret of Blackbeard — told the story of a young man who travels from Montreal to Martinique (it was based on Sylvestre’s biography as a person who was born in France to parents from Martinique) at the request of his dying grandfather, who is haunted by the discovery of a mysterious wooden chest with a connection to the pirate Blackbeard.
According to the Montreal Gazette, Sylvestre’s French-language show aimed at children between four and 10, was part of a tour sponsored by Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM), the public agency that funds arts and literature. In addition to stops in Pointe-Claire and Beaconsfield, the show toured LaSalle, St-Leonard, Anjou, Vaudreuil-Dorion, Rivière-des-Prairies, Côte-des-Neiges and Rosemont.
The Protests
As reported by CBC Montreal, when Sylvestre’s show reached Beaconsfield (Montreal’s West Island), Black community spoke out against it forcing the major to contemplate cancelling the show. In nearby Pointe Claire, city councillor Tara Stainforth and Allison Saunders, a commissioner with the Lester B. Pearson School Board also raised concerns about Sylvestre’s show appearing there.
Despite having performed the show for 15 years, Sylvestre gave several interviews expressing surprise about the Black community’s protests.
"It's a show that's full of love, laughter and joy," Sylvestre said in an interview with CBC Montreal in 2023. “The only person that inspired me was myself. I have the face I have. I have big lips and a big nose. The puppet is bald, however…. It's serious, not only for me, but for the artistic community," he said. "It's a precedent in terms of freedom of speech and artistic liberty."
In response to the show, the West Island Black Community Association (WIBCA) and the Red Coalition, an anti-racism group, denounced what it called Pointe-Claire's "tolerance of a clearly racist children's play featuring a grotesque blackface puppet." WIBCA president Joan Lee subsequently told CBC Montreal she feared that young Black children would be exposed to a negative portrayal of Blackness and possibly be ridiculed.
"We want Pointe-Claire to know that their citizens do not want this play," she said. "They've asked for the opinion of the community and we gave that opinion and we wish that they would listen to that opinion."
In an interview with the Canadian Press (reprinted in the Toronto Star) Philip Howard, a professor in the department of integrated studies in education at McGill University, said he was not sure the puppet was an example of blackface — but he told the newswire that that was beside the point.
“There is still very much the matter of representation and the potential use of monstrous and grotesque representations of Black people as a source of entertainment and even humour,” said Howard, in an interview.
I also spoke to the Canadian Press in March 2023, adding:
“It actually didn’t matter if it was a white actor in blackface or a Black actor in blackface, it was the caricature that audiences thought was funny,” regarding the fact that even though blackface originated with White performers, Black actors donned the exaggerated makeup and participated in the racist performances for White audiences.”
Taking into account Black community outcry, media attention, and academic insights, Beaconsfield City Council made the decision to cancel Sylvestre’s show. Pointe-Claire’s council, on the other hand, kept the show in their Black History Month programming, noting:
“We took the complaints into consideration, but we also took into account the history of the play and the actor, and the fact that he is endorsed by the Conseil des arts de Montréal,” said a Pointe-Claire spokesperson at the time.
Willful Ignorance
While English-language media has covered the story, speaking to Black community members, academics (like me) who study blackface, and Sylvestre — who has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Alain Babineau, Director of Red Coalition's racial profiling and public safety — there has yet to be a detailed analysis of why a grotesque Black puppet would be so appealing to White audiences in Quebec.
In the province (where I also lived for five years), knowledge about Black history, theatre history (of non-Francophone, non-White communities) is not widely celebrated. Therefore, a specific form of willful ignorance persists. As the Montreal Gazette reported in 2023:
“There’s also an absence of Black history education in the school curriculum and a lack of diversity among school staff, all of which the researchers say confirms long-expressed allegations of systemic barriers and inequality in the treatment of Black youth.”
And yet, there are articles that take aim at research on race in Quebec, especially if initiated by the Anglophone community. For example, a Policy Opinion article, published during Black History Month in 2023, used an Angus Reid Institute and the University of British Columbia in 2021 study that asked, “do you think that all races are equal in terms of their natural characteristics, or do you think that some races are naturally superior to others?” as “proof” that racism isn’t a problem in Quebec.
According to the “findings,” only 9 per cent Quebecers believe some races are superior to others, as compared to Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba with a rate of 14 per cent. The problem with such statistics is that they completely ignore report after report, and finding after finding that indicate that Black people and Black history in Quebec is under represented, lacking in education, and that anti-Black racism is just as prevalent in the province, as it is in other parts of the country.
The fact that Sylvestre is Black means that he can’t be accused of being “racist”, but it does not mean he isn’t profiting from peddling racist imagery. This is an important nuance for which there is precedent examples from the United States. There is a long history of Black male performers using Black caricature as their vehicle to theatrical success.
The life of Bert Williams reflects this complex duality — he achieved success as a Black actor on White-controlled stages on the one hand while peddling stereotypes and harmful caricatures of Black people, on the other hand.
Bert Williams (1874-1922)
Miscellaneous Items, PPOC, Library of Congress, 1921, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bob White, Alfred Anderson & Will. H. Dixon., 1909, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Born in the Bahamas in 1874, Bert Williams immigrated to America in the nineteenth century, and even though he had not grown up in a racially codified society, he quickly learned the conventions of the American stage, including wearing blackface. From the 1890s through the 1910s, there were few opportunities for Black performers to act, dance or sing on stages across North America (including Montreal) and Europe unless they wore blackface and performed Black caricatures. Williams was that preeminent Black actor who performed in blackface as if he was a White actor performing as a Black actor. This act made him extremely popular with White audiences.
By the 1920s, however, as African Americans found more opportunities in mass entertainment, the vast majority left blackface behind as they chose to reframe Blackness away from the stereotypes of the nineteenth-century that had lingered into the twentieth century. Bert Williams, however, was heralded as a performer who continued the minstrel tradition of acting like a buffoon, being slow-witted, and painting his face in grotesque make-up while also dancing the high-kicking, strutting cakewalk, a distinctly African American dance that pointed to all that was new in African American expressive culture.
As Williams once observed of his life:
“People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white. I answer ... most emphatically, ‘No.’ How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sandhog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a streetcar conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well-equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient ... in America” (cited in Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds, 2004, p. 147).
His comments remind us that one can love who they are, but make a conscious choice to be non-confrontational so that they can work in the theatre (and today, in film and television).
In her study of his career, Camille Forbes found that as Williams became more of a public figure, in some cases, reintroducing himself to audiences that already knew his work, he was often conflicted between the demands of Black and White audiences.
“Caught between satisfying a White audience, which expected stereotypical performances in the racist discourse of minstrelsy, and a Black audience, which desired political activism in the discourse of representation, Williams made strategic moves,” asserts Forbes (see “Dancing with ‘Racial Feet’: Bert Williams and the Performance of Blackness” 2004, 606).
Bert Williams, PPOC, Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Williams was the preeminent Black actor of his era. In 1910, he accepted Florenz Ziegfeld’s invitation to join the Follies, becoming the first Black actor to integrate Broadway, a position he would largely hold through to 1919.
Source: Oscar Micheaux, c. 1900 CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
If you consider that the great African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) began to “create screen images that would disrupt and challenge conventional racist representations of blackness,” as the late bell hooks once observed of Micheaux’s more than 40 films, Williams’ caricatures were offensive to many Black people even as it made him unique and desirable to White audiences. By the 1920s, Black people were raising their consciousness about who they were, where they wanted to be, and the importance of representation. Williams’ stereotypes might have gone unnoticed in the 1910s, but by the 1920s, Black community grew tired of them. His act was pleasing to White audiences, but it was detrimental to collective Black progress.
Sylvestre was not born and raised in North America. Like Williams, he is an immigrant. And like Williams, he has chosen to assume a performative blackness that makes him extremely popular among White people (Francophone and Anglophone) because it doesn’t challenge them to think critically about Black people — our politics, our histories, and our realities.
Blackness is Not a Monolith … But
I teach and study Black theatre and visual culture. I know the importance of the stage and also the power of embodied representation. Sylvestre has a right to be an artist, but a century after Williams, as Black people, we equally have a right to say NO to his “art.”
“Max” is a grotesque depiction that does more to affirm White supremacist notions of Black inferiority than uplift Black children. As someone who has spent a decade studying this history, if Sylvestre won’t listen to Black community members in Quebec, I sincerely hope he has the wherewithal to listen to the historical evidence because it is not lost in translation.
