Here I am again talking about poetry, a powerful balm for our troubled minds. This week, in front of performances of the International Literature Festival (FIL) in one venue or another in Montreal, its therapeutic power seemed to me more vital than ever. The audience, where diligent heads resurface at each screening, feels lulled by the music of words and instruments, also in search of meaning. That of the artists on the boards, in the service of texts by contemporary or deceased authors, invites us to seek answers deep within us. The verb and theater festival is still rolling in Montreal until Sunday. It is worth attending.
Quebecers are fond of comedy shows, kings of the boards and TV, but what’s the point of endlessly fooling around? The spirit cries out for more substantial sustenance as it spins around this mad planet. The electoral campaign leaves on its hunger. Putin, backed against the wall, threatens the worst. The effects of climate change are unleashing storms. The pandemic will have taught us that the ground may very well open up under our feet.
Laugh when you want to bite? Yes, but still… By the way, emotion, lyrical flight and comedy can go hand in hand, at the FIL as everywhere. Thus at the Cabaret Lion d’Or, for the tasty, the touching, the inspiring, the hilarious O wolf! by Loui Mauffette, who galvanized audiences of all generations. The creator of Poetry, sandwiches and other evenings who lean gave his best show there. The Art Deco frame and the ceiling lights in glass corollas of the cabaret married the memory box open on stage by its atmosphere too.
The author, with musicians and performers, threw into it his vulnerability, his sensitivity, his blockages and misfortunes, his love of great texts and golden voices. A childhood with his father, the poet Guy Mauffette, whose radio show The leaning evening cabaret still haunts living memories, marked it, fertilized it. So, his universe sings, laughs, cries and dances between hymns to the wolf taken from old poems or songs of today. Jean-Paul Daoust’s pastoral ode read by a tongue-in-cheek Gilles Renaud, a colorful charge against the countryside, amused us so much that the Lion d’Or was shaking.
There is only Loui Mauffette to mix the voices of Monique Leyrac and Guy Béart with haunting monologues, humorous spikes and soaring poems, putting the spectators in his pocket. Through the branches, I hear that he would like to host a radio program, in line with that of his late father. Feeding it with songs of yesterday, beautiful and unknown to young audiences, poems, fragments of funny and sad texts in mosaics. And I wonder what Radio-Canada is waiting for to open its airwaves to its enchanted fantasy. People are hungry for finer foods than what society cooks up for them.
After WIRE performances, words remained etched in my head, in earworms. Like those of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973): “Anyone who falls has wings”. This phrase resonated in the Jean-Valcourt studio of the Montreal Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in The dark shadow that we are among texts by Denise Desautels and Marc André Brouillette. All giddy breaths in unison.
Another evening, at the Outremont theatre, the plunge of Robert Lalonde and his companions into the world of Virginia Woolf seemed to me to prefigure our apocalypses in the aptly named A small sidewalk overlooking the abyss. Excerpts from works by the haunted and visionary British writer shed light on stage on the anguish of living of a woman who was going to drown to escape the din of the world and the rise of her dementia, when Hitler’s bombs fell. on his country.
But where to see these shows again? some will ask me. Several of them, launched at the WIRE, bounce elsewhere. Did you miss last year Dream and madness by Brigitte Haentjens? It is on view these days at Quat’Sous, until October 7th.
Alone on stage, Sébastien Ricard makes us discover the dazzling work of the Austro-Hungarian poet Georg Trakl, who died at the age of 27 in 1914 from an overdose (or following a suicide), after having experienced the trauma of the forehead as soldier pharmacist during the Great War. His Rimbaud poetry, apparently addressed to young people in the 21st centurye century in need of a future, intoxicates and panics. “Let me tell you / about this child who looks / today out of the window / from which we see / the countries disappearing: / this child / is a dead man”, he launches in his verses premonitory. At the exit, you think you see the shadow of Georg Trakl sweeping the dead leaves of all our autumn nights.