Margaret Dragu takes us on a journey back to early 1970s Montreal. You may also know Margaret as a Governor-General-Award-winning performance artist! In the 1970s Margaret danced in Montreal at The Shack, where we saw the infamous silhouette window overlooking Sainte-Catherine just east of Drummond. Margaret speaks beautifully about her relationship to the clubs she worked at, many at the crossroads of mid-20th century burlesque and more contemporary stripping.
“When you were working with the silhouette in that window for your act, it was also breaking that barrier of the hidden nightclub, where things are like bad and evil and you have to be 19 or 21 or whatever to get in. And maybe even then you shouldn’t go in. Or people who are really religious never went in and like this huge barrier, it was broken for the streets because it was considered clean enough because it was a silhouette. It wasn’t like a technicolour representation. So this kind of representation was somehow allowed. I do remember one summer it was like an August, a really hot August, lots of traffic and sometimes there would just be huge honking like these people would be stuck on the street. People would even gather under the window sometimes and just watch and applaud. You could hear them applauding. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them. So it had this big impact on the street. I mean, I wasn’t the only one who, you know, created car crashes or had lots of honking. This happened frequently, but it was a real rush. To feel and hear the audience out there in the summer.” Margaret Dragu, talking about her time at The Shack
