Be careful, the following remarks could shock you. Let’s say they clash, but they have the merit of being felt. After all, it’s her experience, she has a lot to tell and, above all, she wants to be heard.
“I wanted to put these two environments face to face, because I am better in a strip club than in a yoga school”, declares without hesitation the one who publishes these days Yogi Stripperan autobiographical story published by Éditions La Mèche (La Courte Échelle), in the Flammèches collection.
If she’s not putting gloves on in her text, she’s outright throwing them on in person. “A strip club is bright, there’s room for all kinds of people and no one lectures you. While in a yoga school, continues the author, met a few days ago, we judge a lot: what I eat, what I consume, what time I get up. »
There are sharks everywhere. In a strip club, sharks are sharks. In a yoga studio, they are dressed up as dolphins…
Marie-Claude Renaud
“In a yoga studio, relationships are gentle. There is a lot of good faith. But it is not because it is in good faith that it is correct to do so”, continues the one who has had enough of “moral superiority”, also served by a “false guru” disguised as a dolphin , we will understand. Dauphin out of his life since, we reassure you.
Moreover, if she no longer teaches yoga (“I’m going to do it, to take care of my body”), she has not closed the door to dance for all that. “I have the opportunity to do something else (including a book and also a construction job!), but the door is not closed, because I really like it! »
Why, exactly? As far back as she can remember, Marie-Claude Renaud, a veritable chatterbox, has always loved to dance. To forget, we understand. “Music is captivating. There is something mesmerizing. When you dance, the pain disappears. There isn’t much that takes up all the space like that, that plugs all the holes. Sexuality? Drugs ? God takes over. No, there is not much that silences a tormented head…”
Because yes, Marie-Claude Renaud, who studied (unfinished) in visual arts, human sciences, nursing, theater and screenwriting, has always had a “tormented head”. “It doesn’t stop…”
And why would you want to dance naked, exactly? “I didn’t know how to be recognized [autrement] “, she replies, pointing to the current culture and all the surrounding hypocrisy. “It’s that culture that made me think I had to undress,” she adds, citing Hollywood and the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s (hello, Pretty Woman).
A “therapeutic treatment”
She began her career in the late twenties, in strip bars in New Brunswick before landing in Kingston, to end up in the most chic clubs in Montreal. It is paradoxically in these same bars that Marie-Claude Renaud also understood that there was not only appearance in life.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Marie-Claude Renaud, author of Yogi Stripper
I have often been the least beautiful, the oldest, the least remade. And I was also often the one who made the most money.
Marie-Claude Renaud
And no, not because she did the most extras. Completely the opposite. “But because of my personality”, says the one who saw her “art” as also relating to “therapeutic care”. “You look, you listen, you welcome. You don’t find that often, ”she argues.
When asked if she is not afraid here of trivializing the world of dancers and prostitution, she replies: “Yes, we live in a culture that trivializes. But me, I tell my life: not to promote it, on the contrary! »
It must be said that no, all is not exactly rosy in his story. Marie-Claude Renaud also recounts her troubled relationship with food (she suffered from bulimia), not to mention drugs. She also spent many months in detox, which earned us yet another rant. “It’s a point of view that you don’t often hear,” she says. But I have things to say. In particular: “Abstinence, in my opinion, is not sobriety. It’s not balance. Once addicted, always addicted? “I don’t really believe in that,” she says. Maybe in some cases? “Maybe not,” she adds. Me, I take a joint puff every other day, I’m able to eat a dessert and I’m able to have a drink without getting drunk. »
Note the irony: “I complain about people who preach morality and I end up moralizing,” laughs Marie-Claude Renaud. Me, I especially want people to be entertained. They don’t have to be educated…” A little jostled, perhaps?
Yogi Stripper
Marie-Claude Renaud
The Wick
256 pages