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Betty Bonifassi was on edge on Friday.

“I’m so scared,” she confided. “It’s something very big for me, what’s happening. It’s the culmination of years of work. I’m nervous. I want people to like it, and understand what we tried to express.”

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Bonifassi realizes this is not a given. She is the lead vocalist of the most popular ticketed show at the 39th Montreal International Jazz Festival. SLĀV, “a theatrical odyssey based on slave songs,” directed by Quebec theatre/Cirque du Soleil luminary Robert Lepage, runs Tuesday through July 14 at Théâtre du nouveau monde. The first five nights are sold out. In all, more than 8,000 tickets have been sold for 16 performances.

Bonifassi came to the director with 200 pages of research and ideas, which he synthesized into a single narrative thread. SLĀV, five years in the making, follows a young black woman on a voyage of discovery.

“That’s the grandeur of his genius of mise-en-scène,” she said. “He wanted to bring this character to the source.”