Fred Pellerin fills the halls of Quebec’s greatest theaters with his stories and his music, alone on these huge stages, with nothing but his guitar and a microphone stand. Before, he also had a chair, but since the pandemic, it has retired from touring. “She was taking up space in the tank,” he tells us, his eyes laughing. The duty met him as he was preparing to relaunch his Quebec tour of The descent to businessstorytelling show in which he invites us under the Damocles sword of time.
For 20 years he has been stoking the embers of his tales. Warm in a pizzeria in La Petite-Patrie, he can’t believe it: “Sometimes, we passed in front of the Maison de la culture where my agent saw me performing for the first time. In 2001, or something like that. I was in college at the same time, I was doing this for the fun. I never thought it would lead me to where I am today. »
Today, with a full voice and lively eyes, he is overwhelmed with bliss. To have escaped these ephemeral artistic journeys, to have been able to experience intoxicating projects and to still be there, a new spectacle in the mouth, with an audience that responds presently: “At some point, I say to myself… they are going to ‘to be sick of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton…’ On the contrary, we are delighted to find him, back home after a trip to France with his new batch of tales, in which the now well-known Toussaint Brodeur, keeper of the store general of Saint-Élie, is the protagonist of The descent to business.
Celebrate All Saints Day
Fred Pellerin rejects any esoteric relationship with his characters, but he admits that they sometimes give him the impression of imposing themselves on him: “I realize that every time. It’s as if the main character of a new show started to interest me in the previous show. »
Sign that the charms of Toussaint operated on the storyteller, this one was at the heart of his first youth album, small boat racepublished in November 2021. Fred Pellerin also highlights the contribution of Émile Proulx-Cloutier, interpreter of Toussaint in The time grabbera feature film also released in November 2021, which propelled the character by injecting him with even more relief and character.
But if Toussaint is at the heart of The descent to business, it is also the result of a concerted decision: “I have a growing obsession with time, and I found that with Toussaint, there was a nice clash to be created between time and its relationship to money. . »
The pleasure and madness of creation took me a long time. There was a time when I was doing 125 shows a year. But now, I don’t do that anymore. I do 75. It took me a long time to reach that balance.
As usual, Fred Pellerin draws inspiration from the figures of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton to fuel his tales, but beneath the features of the shopkeeper also slips the memory of his father. Skilled counter and tireless storyteller, his father took pleasure in handling numbers to subjugate them to his creation: “My father was not thirsty for money, but he resembles Toussaint in the way he plays with the system. His game was to unleash the numbers. »
In a capitalist world where the column of figures weighs heavily in the balance of our concerns, Fred Pellerin takes great care to put flesh and heart into his All Saints’ Day, notably inviting us around the bread oven, where Brodeur met the love. He also assures us that he is first and foremost a trickster who enjoys taking the numbers hostage: “Toussaint is not mean. He’s a rogue. He loves money, but he especially loves the game that money allows him. We sometimes think he’s stuck, but Toussaint always gets out of it… except in front of eternity. »
A wireframe creative process
Immersed in the universe of his tales, celebrating his turns of language, his amazing narrative twists or his flights of exaggeration that make our laughter swell to the point of taking our ribs, one would think that Fred Pellerin works his texts by the quarter of turn. It is not so. “Me, I work in improvisation”, he admits, lifting the sheet placed in front of us, chaining: “My show fits on your sheet, there, no more voluminous than your interview plan. »
Is the storyteller exaggerating? He assures us not: “The first time, I have to do 1h15. I want people to have fun. I come on stage with a pile of plates on my head. I walk slowly. But after about thirty performances, I am no longer looking for the beams, I have found a balance and I know where I can jump and where it is better not to go. »
The exploration of the beginnings, sprinkled with the intoxication of discoveries, is then followed by another, freer pleasure: “When I know the forces of show, I can have fun opening the little doors, the flourishes of the language, the delusions where I can let myself go. I have fun with it and the show stretches, and at some point I have to make cuts. It does this every time. I left at 1:15 am, here I am at 1:40 am.”
Keeper of the fire
While Fred Pellerin gave himself the freedom to add or subtract time from his shows, he became increasingly aware that this freedom was circumscribed. Time flies. And if he knows death well enough to have staged it, he knows that it cannot be controlled to the point of pulling the strings.
In recent years, he admits having refocused his energies and marked out his priorities: “The pleasure and madness of creation took me a long time. There was a time when I was 125 shows per year. But now, I don’t do that anymore. I do 75. It took me a long time to reach that balance. »
He cites the example of sugaring off, which he used to do with his father: “When he died in 2007, I told myself that I would not skip a season. But my producer called me for a show in Paris. Four days. Well, I said yes. But sugars, if you skip four days in the month that it lasts, it doesn’t work. The following year, it was a documentary on Gilles Vigneault [Le goût d’un pays]. Worse in the end, it took eleven years. But now it’s been five years, and now sugaring off month is sacred. »
He talks about it with passion, the words sweet and generous like a good syrup, admitting that the rhythm of the sugars reminds him of a humility that does good: “You put yourself at the mercy of the thing. You sit with her. It’s meditative. Far from living in slow motion, on the contrary driven by an urgency to inhabit existence, he disregards time and enrolls in a daily life of furious fire, where he learns to live in a forest he has been living in for a few years: “For me, who is more of a gentleman than a lumberjack, it’s really interesting to rub shoulders with nature in this way. I have a truffle project, a sugar shack, I log wood, I have my children, I dream of a trip…”
On stage as in the open canvas of his existence, he enjoys opening doors, getting carried away by what they conceal. Maybe he will have to cut soon, to fit his desires to the calendar, but in the meantime, life is a damn good show.