After winning passes for Pop Montréal with Yelp I had the pleasure of seeing Alanis Obomsawin perform at le Monument-National. If you're not familiar with Obomsawin, she's one of Canada's most important indigenous filmmakers and performers. Seeing her after her decades-long career in radical representation of indigenous folks was an outright honour.
I say all this to contextualize how great seeing her at this venue was. Le Monument-National is Canada's oldest theatre and is beautiful in that old-world way. With this comes some specificities: you will be seated during a show here, you likely will have to be quiet, you're not allowed to eat in the theatre (although they do sell chips at the bar), and you may or may not be allowed to drink during a show. Despite the irony of seeing a woman with a distinctly anti-colonial narrative perform at "the country's" oldest venue I have to say all the elements that made up the space really highlighted her greatness. The silence that the theatre and her presence commanded over the crowd was like nothing I've ever experienced: by the end of the show most of us were in tears.
I likely wouldn't go out of my way to see a show at this venue, however if you ever get the chance to see someone great here I would venture to say it will be legendary. read more