Amour Toujours
Jennifer Jack
18 décembre 2025 – avril 2026
H. Fisher & Fils
4129, boul. Saint-Laurent
Photo : Laurence Poirier
ARTISTE
Jennifer Jack
TECHNICIEN•NE
Chloé Rivest
DIRECTRICE ARTISTIQUE
Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer
COMMISSAIRES
Taryn Fleischmann, Austin Henderson
Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer
A site-specific toy theatre installation by scenographer Jennifer Jack, Amour Toujours is a playful exploration of Cinéma L’Amour’s history as an auditorium for Yiddish vaudeville performances and its place in the historically Jewish corridor of Saint-Laurent Boulevard.
Popular in the mid-19th to early-20th century, Vaudeville theatre is a form of variety entertainment that showcases a combination of burlesque, comedy, and dance routines, with its roots found in what is often termed « low-brow » popular entertainment, such as sideshows, circus acts, minstresly, and dime museums.
Within the North American Jewish context, vaudeville also incorporated components of Yiddish theatre, musical, and comedy traditions becoming a significant avenue for European Jewish immigrants to navigate assimilation within Canada and the United States. With many de facto prejudicial barriers to professions and institutions Jews encountered in their new homes, Yiddish vaudeville provided a special kind of space; a place of joy and escape for and by Jews in their own language.
Much like New York City, Montréal was a hub for Yiddish vaudeville entertainment (and vaudeville more generally), offering highly sought-after Yiddish venues such as Le Monument-National (present day National Theatre School) and The Globe (present day Cinema L’amour).
Yiddish is a language spoken primarily by Ashkenazi Jews, blending German, Hebrew, Slavic, and other regional linguistic influences. Like other Jewish diasporic languages such as Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Persian, it is traditionally written using the Hebrew alphabet.
Originating around the 9th century AD, Yiddish became a vibrant language for everyday life, literature, and culture, and by the early 20th century was spoken by around 10–11 million people. This included large immigrant communities in North America, who generated a great deal of public entertainment in the language, such as theatrical productions, vaudeville variety acts, and pop music. Historically, Montreal was one of these major Yiddish cultural centres; in 1931, 99% of its Jewish community spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, and would have sought out activities and entertainment in their native language at locations like The Globe Theatre.
Today, the number of active speakers has declined to fewer than a million worldwide, though it remains vital in some Jewish communities and cultural circles.
Toy Theatre, also known as paper theatre or model theatre, is a miniature tabletop stage form popularized in Europe during the early 19th century. These miniature stages began as souvenirs for enthusiastic playgoers, but the form quickly turned into a popular pastime activity for individuals of all ages. Like the toy theatre on display in our front vitrine, typical toy theatres consist of a proscenium arch, with set pieces, scenes, and characters mounted to flat pieces of cardboard. These individual layers are commonly manipulated by sticks or hanging wires. In recent years there has been a resurgence of the art form amongst puppeteers and artists alike because of the practices’ accessible nature and the ample possibilities it affords.
Within the Jewish North American context, much like general puppetry theatre, toy theatres can be seen integrating Eastern European and Yiddish folk traditions.
Amour Toujours explores the multilayered history of Canada’s last adult cinema, Cinéma L’Amour, through toy theatre and shadow puppetry. By peeling back these layers, this work considers the cinema’s history as a Yiddish vaudeville theatre, Jewish life in the Plateau, and more broadly, the rise and fall of public amusements in urban space. Amour Toujours situates the cinema as both a physical site for historic excavation and a playground for speculation, where real and imagined histories grow.
The site known today as Cinéma L’Amour first opened as The Globe in 1914 and then again as Le Hollywood in 1932. It would have been a neighbourhood landmark for the local community to see affordable Yiddish film and vaudeville. The theatre transitioned to showing only adult film content in 1969, re-opening as the Pussycat in an era where many film theatres closed due to the advent of television, or re-established themselves as adult theatres to serve the changing market.
Initially developed as part of the Museum of Jewish Montreal’s Microgrant Program in April 2025, Amour Toujours has been expanded upon to incorporate more sophisticated mechanics and animations. Inside the theatre, a curtain and numerous backdrops fly in and out, depicting a series of tableaus. At the back of the theatre, a screen presents a three-part film, illuminating history through newspaper clippings, fire insurance maps, and whimsical reimaginings of vaudeville and adult film through a sequence of cockroach shadow puppet animations, all filmed on an overhead projector.
The title Amour Toujours, and the cockroach characters embedded in the piece, imply the resilience of the theatre through the evolution of mass entertainment and its changing audiences. Today, Saint Laurent Boulevard hosts family-run businesses and new developments, adding to the shifting texture of Montreal’s identity.
Amour Toujours (détail)
Painted panel, video with hand-cut shadow puppets
2025
Photo : Laurence Poirier
Amour Toujours (vidéo)
Archival map with text overlay
2025
Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste
Jennifer Jack is a scenographer currently based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal. Holding a BFA Specialization in Design for the Theatre from Concordia University, Jen works at the intersection of scenography and puppetry. Often taking a highly-researched approach to creation, Jennifer’s work frequently seeks to explore sites of cultural memory. Engaging with nostalgia and place, they is perennially curious about the cycles of the urban spaces in which they are immersed. Recent credits include scenography for To Pieces (Who Me? Theatre), presented at the 2025 Montreal Fringe Festival, and as a collaborator on Ten Sentences: On the Life of Robert Walser (Mark Sussman/Great Small Works), presented at the 2024 Festival de Casteliers.
Alongside their artistic practice, Jennifer contributes to organizing several Montrealbased arts initiatives including Café Concret and ContraMontreal. Jennifer is an alumni of the Museum of Jewish Montreal’s Microgrants for Creative and Cultural Exploration.
This installation was produced under the Montreal Jewish Arts Collaborative (MJAC) granting initiative, made possible through the support of CANVAS, the Azrieli Foundation, the Averbach Family Foundation, and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
