Montreal (AFP)
Mélodie Rousseau, 33, is an actress by profession. In the evening, this Canadian makes up as a man and becomes Rock Beer, a "drag-king" that occurs in Montreal cabarets. An artistic but also "political" approach for these women who try to emerge from the shadow of the drag-queens.
Two and a half hours before going on stage to sing the songs of Quebec rocker Eric Lapointe in play-back, Mélodie begins to prepare in her dressing room.
On her thin face, she carefully draws the features of her character with a brush. "We erase the girl to make room for this male virile" she plays.
Gradually, she erases her feminine lines, digs her dark circles, amplifies her eyebrows and hardens her jaw. Then the petite young woman straps her breasts, draws abdominals pronounced on her belly, sticks false hair on her chest and her chin.
In a very male dominated niche by drag-queens, popularized by a famous television show in the United States, the regular drag-kings are still counting on the fingers of one hand in the Quebec metropolis, according to Charli Deville , veteran Canadian drag-king.
According to him, four drag-kings are regularly scheduled in cabarets in Montreal, against about 80 drag-queens.
Mélodie Rousseau is one of those rare "kings" who have taken the plunge. She already ran a café, an actress career and her own theater company, before letting Rock Beer enter her life last year.
At first, she did not want to do it, but her girlfriend "forced" her, she laughs.
"Of course there is a more political side, because a girl will take the role of the man" according to the actress. "There is a danger in the fact that a woman dares to wear the dominant sex physique".
According to David Risse, director of the Center for Research and Cultural and Community Activities for Diversities in Montreal, the drag-king practice is "a statement," it's about "empowerment" (emancipation).
The women drag-kings, he says, "reclaim a genre (...) and they do what they want."
Melodie chose her niche: "I'm really going into criticism or parodying the male".
The time of a duet in play-back, Rock Beer shares the stage with the drag-queen Crystal Slippers. Rock is sticky, flirty, even pathetic in his approach to Crystal that keeps pushing him away, making the audience laugh.
- A world of queens -
Melodie admits having to overcome his own fears by entering the world of "drags". The young thirty-year-old feared the judgment of the public, her relatives, but also "to be a girl in a middle of men".
Indeed, the scenes of "drag" - often gay cabarets - are usually places dominated by the presence of drag-queens, that is to say classically men disguised as women.
Drag-kings, and their shows that sometimes show men frail or insecure, can disturb in a gay club, notes the sociologist David Risse.
"I feel that when we play on masculinity, we still play with tweezers.So we see caricatures of femininity by drag-queens that they can afford everything," Risse analysis.
Nevertheless, the mentalities evolve little by little, estimates for its part Rita Baga, drag-queen headliner of the famous Cabaret Mado in the Village (gay district of Montreal).
"It's a milieu that is becoming more and more inclusive," she says.
- Out of the shadows -
Little by little, the drag-kings are succeeding in gaining a place on the scenes of the LGBT community. This will be the case, for example, at the Montreal Pride Festival (August 8-18), which for the first time will be dedicated to them in its official programming, ManSpread.
"To my knowledge, this is the first and biggest drag-king show that Pride Montreal has had," said Charli Deville, Montreal's English-speaking drag-king, who hosts the ManSpread show, presented every month in a burlesque cabaret in Montreal. .
Melodie "Rock Beer" will participate in this show, scheduled for August 16th.
"To make this man extra masculine, macho, it looks like it gives me confidence in my everyday life as a woman," says Mélodie. Her character even helps her to assume "in all my femininity and in what I am," she says.
© 2019 AFP