I’ve always been drawn to things that don’t fit. To spaces that are too loud, too soft, too strange. To people who don’t behave or who behave too much.
To art that doesn’t apologize, that’s why I love cabaret.
Not just a stage or a performance.
But a way of being expressive, unapologetic, a little sideways.
It’s theatre, but looser. Music, but embodied. Dance, but charged with meaning.
It’s a language of silhouettes, irony, and emotion.

Cabaret doesn’t pretend to be neutral. It reveals the cracks in a smile, in a lyric, in the way a gesture lingers.
It invites you to look closer.
And then, it dares you to feel something.
What fascinates me is how it balances lightness and depth: the sparkle and the silence.
The laughter that says more than the words.

I think about the musical “Cabaret” a lot, the 1972 film, with Liza Minnelli’s trembling voice, set in Berlin right before everything falls apart. In the Kit Kat Klub, people sing, drink, and flirt. Outside, fascism grows.
And no one stops dancing.
That’s the point.
The Emcee, this strange, seductive, genderless host, tells us everything from the start. He mocks the world. He warns us.
And we laugh, we clap, we look away.
That’s what cabaret is.
It shows us “us”. How we ignore, how we distract ourselves, how we celebrate while injustice knocks on the door.
“Cabaret” is not only a musical, it shrieks at the people’s frustration and pain of that time, all in a glamorous, comedic, and artistic way.

That’s why I come back to it. Because it reminds me that art can seduce and scream at the same time.
That it’s okay to be soft and furious, sensual and political. That beauty doesn’t erase suffering, and it reveals it.
Cabaret is not just about lust. It’s about liberation through excess, about laughing with tears stuck in your throat and singing the truth because saying it isn’t enough.

Nowadays, Cabaret is used in a lot of industries, but we don’t call it that way anymore.
Even today, the influence of cabaret can be felt in unexpected places: in fashion editorials that dare to be strange, in singers who refuse to flatten their voices, in artists who perform vulnerability without apology. It’s not just an art form. It’s a lens. It shows us what’s absurd in the world by embracing the absurd itself. And that’s maybe the most honest way to live.

I always dreamed that perhaps, someday, I would be able to perform it, show a glimpse of the theatre that is my life. Not in grand gestures or perfect lines, but in the quiet elegance of a raised eyebrow, a whispered truth, a spotlight that finds me even when I’m unsure of my place on the stage. Maybe that day will come. Maybe it won’t. But the art will always live inside me. Cabaret is not just a stage I admire from afar. It’s a rhythm I carry in the way I move through the world, the way I feel things deeply but tell them softly, always with a touch of glitter.

Cassandre Journoud