In passing conversation, the word cabaret may evoke smoke-filled drunkenness and radical satire, or perhaps a French-cancan dancers' floorshow. An academician's ear may cringe at the flitting thought of a house of prostitution of those serious matters which are literature and music. Scratch all that, let it pass, even if the detractors can point out to such specific example of depravation. La Scala, Broadway and L'Olympia all have some scandal in their pasts.

By the power of positive thinking, visualize a live, spontaneous Prairie Home Companion, remember the hootenannies, remember Tom Lehrer. This is what cabaret was like in the eighties, I mean in the 1880's. The movement began in Paris' bohemia when the poets of the Left Bank, the Hydropaths among them (hydropath means you get sick if you drink water, instead of wine or, worse, absinth) ... when the poets moved to the hill of Montmartre and founded the cabaret Le Chat Noir in 1881. There, the poets invited the artists of the Hill, painters, journalists, dramatists, singers and musicians, to share and discuss their products and ideas. It was, in some sort, a show-and-tell.

Yes, there was smoke and alcoholic spirits, and a definite subculture grew out of it. But the novelty at the time was that multimedia art was being shared with the public. A presenter, or emcee (le conférencier) organized artist rotation and public participation; he managed informality and spontaneity into a fluid show.

That is the aspect of Cabaret which I implement when I have a chance: in a church basement, in a coffee shop, at a summer camp, in a night club. When I do, I call it "Cabaret Raw", in contrast with the more polished "Cabaret Well Done."

The Paris Cabaret developed into a distinguished art form: it became a chamber concert or recital of voice and piano music, dropping the discussions, the poetry, the public participation, but refining the performance and attracting compositions by Satie, Debussy and Schönberg.

The notion of "chamber concert" comes unexpectedly close to the concept of cabaret, and it illustrates the intimacy that is expected from this art form. In fact, the word itself tells you so. (Oh, how I relish these moments when I discover the words!) Cabaret is Cabret is chambrette. (Oh, how intimate the chambrette!) It is in Flanders and Walloon country, where Mediterranean and Germanic cultures meet, that the word cabret = chambrette was used for what in German still today is eine Stube (which used to be the family room of a Gasthaus and became the village tavern). The quality of the Stube is its Gemütlichkeit, its intimate, home-like congeniality. Cabrets and roadhouses supplied varied entertainment to their guests. And this is what Le Chat Noir in 1881 was re-creating in the Paris artists' colony of Montmartre.

Cabaret came to America in 1896 and went to Germany in 1897 with Yvette Guilbert. It was in Berlin that a new breed of entertainment attached to the name: the radical satire, the political protest and, yes, sometimes, social unrest and grim rowdiness. The Broadway show titled Cabaret (also a 1972 film with Liza Minelli) is a portrayal, not of the German cabaret, but of decadence and desperation under nazism, the moral flight into entertainment.

Cabaret as a style or art form, its soulfulness and dark humors, is still today being promoted by individual artists like Yvette Guilbert in her one-woman shows. Cabaret as a performance formula or performance space was an opportune re-naming of the cafés-concerts that opened when Cabaret had become too distinguished for the common people. These establishments offered a string of acts in a variety of art forms that could include fire-swallowers. There are some modern cabarets that limit themselves to a tour de chant by a headliner artist, maybe with a couple of scheduled openers. This formula fits the name of concert rather than cabaret.

A few other formulas and styles have confused the public about Cabaret. Music hall and Musical Theater of course are meant for the hall, not the chambrette, but many of the songs of those halls, with a healthy dose of intimate emotion, have made it into the repertoire of the cabaret artists. That is why some people associate Broadway with Cabaret. But if it hasn't got that chamber touch, it isn't Cabaret. Just to blur the picture some more, certain interlocutors have made associations to the Théâtre des Variétés or the Théâtre des Nouveautés, to dancers and savant dogs, to jugglers and jesters, and vaudeville.

Music hall and cafés-concerts (Sarah Bernhard and Collette's caf'conç) were the theaters and aristocratic salons descending into the streets. Cabaret was bohemia climbing The Hill, attracting its public with multimedia humorous publicity (one more tapage by Aristide Bruant), including this public into multimedia humorous shows. In the 1890, Cabaret refined itself into an art form. The cabaret of the soulful writers and painters had become a stage for soulsearching singers and musicians. Music hall and caf'conç meant to remain entertaining. Cabaret means to remain engaging.

Our American coffeehouses, those with a "feature" preceded by an "open mike", in fact are closer to the original spirit of Cabaret, because of the spontaneity of the open-stage segment: poets, storytellers and humorists can sign up and be recognized. Hurray for democratic institutions! Yet these coffeehouses do not demonstrate the fluidity, the artistic tenor, the rotation, the public participation, the give-and-take of original Cabaret.

-- marcel k troubadour