It’s hard not to love Clémence DesRochers, a timeless figure who knew how to ride under her first name as a member of the family. Young female comedians take her as a model. Had she not cleared the comic path in Quebec at a time when these ladies were suffocating under the shackles? Its fragility mixed with derision touches us. We feel our flaws, we share them, we understand them. His little music reverberates in inner resonance. So frail and so strong, the multifaceted artist who has always darkened. But how to be the daughter of the poet Alfred DesRochers without carrying deep tears? Melancholy feminine clowns are still a rare species – who dares to nuance it so much on stage to cheer up the crowds? His endearing profile, his songs and his performances blend with the course of our company.
So, reading the biography of columnist Mario Girard, Clemence once again, I plunged into his psyche as much as into the adventure of Quebec, pre, post and during the bubbling Quiet Revolution. This beautiful volume, published by Éditions La Presse, is accompanied by an album of photos, handwritten letters, drawings by the artist, and newspaper clippings. Through the rise of his career scrolls the passage of time, the Clémence years that we have known, those that preceded us, twisted in the thread of his life. She was so comical at the cinema in 2003 as a mischievous spy in The great seduction by Jean-François Pouliot, which earned him a Jutra prize. Each era returns its face to us.
The singer of The life of factrie is socially engaged without having sought it, just by describing the humans around her, at the factory as much as at home. It is with the same ardor that she will sing in 1989 the menopause in her show I have show!, a story of helping women break a taboo. Clémence DesRochers imposes her love with her companion without shocking the gallery, simply walking outside the nails. Her own style, she has always kept it. It commands respect.
I love when she writes in her poem The birth : “I am an accident, born of a disappointed father and a tired mother. The cradle of beings marks them. His survival instinct was his spur.
Fascinating childhood in Sherbrooke! His poet father, enthroned among the books, leads his offspring to the realm of fantasy while drowning in the bottle, without the recognition that this erudite autodidact dreamed of for his work. So the money is inevitably lacking. His mother keeps the ship afloat. Clémence creates her toys and games. Imagination is its mentor. But sensitive children brought up uninhibited waste away in school. The little girl would like to saw off her wooden chair. Evidenced by his hilarious monologue Fra gio gio Fragetti on Mademoiselle Bourbonnais, the whipping boy of a teaching sister; true piece of anthology.
Her beginnings as a teacher bore her. So it is the theater school, where the bubbling Paul Buissonneau believes in her, engages her in his troupe La roulotte… Radio-Canada TV still starts in 1957. In the hands of this beginner, the roles in The Plouffe family And The surprise box all fall hot. Then the king of the music hall Jacques Normand recruited her at the Cabaret Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This is before she founded the group Les Bozos with André Gagnon, Claude Léveillée, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Jacques Blanchet, Raymond Lévesque and Hervé Brousseau. Before she opens her own boxes which work and then close. So this dynamo shines elsewhere, plays here and there, records, gets back on stage, then despite itself becomes a tutelary figure covered with tributes.
Between the lines emerge fragments of this woman. Because there are Clémences, green ones, ripe ones and unripe ones: the hyperactive, the depressed, the courageous, the jack-of-all-trades, the one who set up the feminist musical review The Girls alongside Diane Dufresne and Louise Latraverse, among others. Without forgetting the woman who sang after a heartache: “When I want to drown my sorrow / I’m going to get lost at Eaton’s / You never see anyone cry / On the counter of the stores”.
Clémence unleashed laughter even when she invited her audience to cry. His comic aura overshadowed his tender or worried vein. From now on, the perspectives would be reversed. The wheel turns, the planet changes. To Mario Girard, she confides her anxieties in the face of the tragedies of the COVID, of the war in Ukraine. Yes, her tone would be different if she took up the pen again: “I think that instinctively, I would write more serious things. I would put more poetry. Making humor in a worried world is difficult, ”she says. We enter in unison with Clemence. True that there is nothing to laugh so hard today.