The La Bordée theater presents, from October 25 to November 19, the latest by Émile Proulx-Cloutier. Grosse-Île, 1847 (in the words of those who lived through it) draws from the archives of one of the most tragic episodes in our history to portray the humans who had to go to the front 175 years ago to face a health crisis which is not unlike the one whose the world is still struggling to emerge.
In 1847, the Great Famine reached its climax in Ireland. The sun may never set on the British Empire, but hunger and death mow down its subjects by the millions just in the shadow of its metropolis. The Irish, driven by despair, embark by the tens of thousands for America. These starving people pile into unsanitary sailboats that are unsuitable for the transport of human beings, and navigate in conditions where only illnesses can be felt when cruising. These proliferate, typhus in the lead, decimating the destitute for whom there is nothing left to lose, except their lives.
Canada will welcome 100,000 of these Irish immigrants in 1847 alone. All will pass through a tiny quarantine place called Grosse-Île, located about forty kilometers downstream from Quebec.
On site, a handful of men and women have the mandate to welcome this poor and sick multitude on an area of 7 square kilometers – barely larger than Île Notre-Dame.
Their mission: to treat those who can, bury those who can no longer, and prevent the epidemics that germinate on the ships from spreading on the continent. “The initial spark was the disproportion between the mission entrusted to this world and the means to which they had access, says Émile Proulx-Cloutier, who ensures the creation and the staging of the show produced by La Bordée. . The duty to face up to this surge, to an unprecedented crisis, fell on the shoulders of a very, very limited number of human beings, in a very, very limited place as well. »
Archive Remix
For Émile Proulx-Cloutier, the episode of Grosse-Île, reduced to a footnote in history lessons, nevertheless illustrates a moment when a society finds itself facing the abyss, without landmarks and condemned to seek an exit in the middle of the fog.
“My focal point was the island staff who were responsible for taking on the mission of welcoming this human tide,” explains the author. I plunged into this memory at the beginning of our own cataclysm, in the spring of 2020.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Émile Proulx-Cloutier therefore devoted his days to unearthing the written archives of Grosse-Île. Helped by archivist Maude Charest and his accomplice Alex Guèvremont, the artist searched through press articles, diaries, notebooks and other manuscripts of all kinds dating from 1847.
Crises act as revealers, and it is often after a period of crisis that we take the necessary actions. A crisis, too, always hides another, and another, and another…
This raw material allowed him to hear the human heart which beats under the smooth, sometimes simplistic history that societies retain from their past.
“Everything you will hear during the show comes from these archives,” explains the author, who bears this title without having written a single line of the piece. His creative role in Grosse Ile, 1847he compares it to that of a DJ.
Émile Proulx-Cloutier has triturated a paragraph here, cut out a sentence there, to mix the words in a great exercise of collage which finally composes a dramatic work fashioned from this dusted memory. The principal interested party baptized his approach the “remix of archives”.
” It’s not I love Hydro, it is not a documentary investigation, nuance the author-remixer. I’m not here to give information. Personally, what I often miss in our relationship to history are sensations. To feel like I’m part of it and that the humans who make it aren’t just vague distant ghosts, but they’re here with me. I want to remember how similar these people can be to me. »
An unusual situation
Grosse-Île’s health crisis inevitably echoes the one that hit the world in 2020. “Suddenly, the sentence I heard on the radio was like a sentence I had read in such a book. [écrit en 1847], remembers the playwright. I don’t believe history repeats itself, but sometimes there are echoes that bounce around. Like this feeling of not really understanding what tomorrow is going to be like, this vertigo that occurs because we are all immersed in the heart of an unusual situation…”
In these periods when uncertainty blocks his horizon, the human remains constant, both immense in his courage and small in his cowardice.
“There is a great burst of fear, but at the same time, great outbursts of solidarity, remembers Émile Proulx-Cloutier from his trip in 1847. There are people, in those moments, who go to the front. Not everyone goes there, but some go and they go all the way. »
There are also companies looking for scapegoats as soon as everything goes wrong. “Crises act as revealers, and it is often after a period of crisis that we take the necessary actions,” notes the author. A crisis, too, always hides another, and another, and another…”
Émile Proulx-Cloutier hopes that by making the disappeared voices of Grosse-Île resonate, he will offer words capable of reconciling us with the doubts and anguish of our time. To avoid the pitfalls that have so often led to the abyss.