Original, nurturing, even amniotic, representation par excellence of the individual and collective unconscious, symbol of durability and eternal renewal, the sea has long, if not always, been associated with the feminine. In his third piece, The Ten Commandments by Dorothy Dixcurrently playing at the Espace Go theatre, Stéphanie Jasmin continues to embrace this rich metaphor by inviting powerful tides, contradictory currents, violent undertows and carrier waves.
“It’s been a hundred years tomorrow that I wake up every morning, a hundred years that I find myself with my face and look at the world around me, a hundred years that I open my eyes to another day. » Daughter, sister, wife, mother and grandmother, firmly clinging to the ten commandments to be happy by the American journalist Dorothy Dix, the woman who speaks to us has been engaged for a century in a quest where happiness appears as a terrible injunction, an existence with multiple repressed desires whose time has come to take stock.
last shore
The fate of this woman, who would be similar to that of the author’s grandmother, is summarized on stage in a moving 75-minute monologue that takes us into the intimacy of the character, into the workings of her psyche. , skilfully overlapping places and times. Appearing at the edge of the sea, thanks to video projections as delicate and neat as the music that accompanies them, never far from a rock placed in the middle of this last shore, Julie Le Breton captivates. In order to embody her character at 8, 20 or 80 years old, she adopts with sobriety the body and voice that correspond. Directed with mastery by Denis Marleau, the actress arouses strong emotions.
It is largely a question of domestic life, but even more of creation. The incredible power of art is at the heart of the most beautiful moments of the show: the trip to New York, the visit to the museum, the visits to the brother “who cries while listening to opera arias, who paints, who draws and who written”, the stay in Paris with her granddaughter, in whom she recognizes an unexpressed part of herself. In the face of this woman whose literary aspirations were cruelly curbed by her time and her society, we cannot help but recognize certain traits of Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath.
At the end of her assessment, the woman recognizes that happiness is illusory and that only joy counts: “Joy is more fleeting, dancing on the crest of the waves, joy cannot be tamed, cannot be manufactured, it appears, it arises in spite of itself […], joy appears through sadness and melancholy, thwarts anger, taunts the desire to die, it makes me breathe, makes me breathe. »