“Guys” rarely cry in Bordeaux prison. Except, perhaps, after the passage of the workshop concerts that the Orchester de l’Agora, under the direction of the young conductor Nicolas Ellis, has been giving there since last July. But these, like so many other events, were cut short in November by the pandemic.
These tears, which the prison chaplain, Stéphane Roy, observes while following up after concerts with inmates, show that culture, far beyond simple “entertainment”, acts as a powerful indicator of our humanity.
After the concert, “they are calmed down”, maintains the chaplain, who also launched the project. “They returned to themselves, ‘inside’, as we say when we go back to prison. And frankly, it’s not a habit in the male prison environment to enter “inside” oneself. In prison, you don’t cry. Art can weaken, can remove masks, put in a state of vulnerability. I find that it will seek the beauty in them. There are guys who come back to me with ideas that come from their originality, their creativity. »
While the government has just launched a mental health plan and counts the psychologists who could carry it out, the absence of the living arts from the lives of Quebecers caused by the pandemic is sorely felt.
Art and psychology, same fight
For psychologist Nicolas Lévesque, art and psychology go hand in hand. “Psychology is an art of speech, emotions and presence. The same main axes are used. Both, he specifies, “emphasize the process more than the result”, and offer “another relationship to time and space”.
This extended relationship to space-time, “that’s what is threatened”, he says, “in a system completely eaten away by ideals of efficiency”. Moreover, he notes, many health professionals choose to leave the public system precisely to save their art. Like art, psychology can affect generations, and provides an opportunity for humans to reinvent themselves. The human being is the only animal able to do this. “A fish cannot imitate a dog, but humans can play at being something other than what they are,” explains Nicolas Lévesque.
“Human beings need another scene than their current scene, another language, another relationship to time and space,” he continues. It is in this way that Shakespeare continues to touch the public for generations after his death, and that psychology, believes Nicolas Lévesque, also a psychoanalyst, can have benefits over several generations within the same family. Without theatre, without a living culture in which to project ourselves, we have been living for nearly two years in a sort of “symbolic prison”.
And in our pressed societies, the pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of this “laboratory”, from which nevertheless “the best ideas and the best solutions” come, whether in art or in a fundamental research workshop.
“We lacked creativity from the start,” says Mr. Lévesque. And if it is true that art is also entertainment, as summarized a little quickly this week by the national director of public health, Luc Boileau, it also writes the great history of culture. In other words, a part of the history of humanity.
What vision for culture?
This feeling of abandonment, the conductor Nicolas Ellis, who notably founded the Orchester de l’Agora, also experienced it in Quebec during the pandemic. Remember that the Orchester de l’Agora has given itself the mission of “reinventing the role of classical musicians in society by giving them the power to collectively increase their impact on the world”. It also acts, in collaboration with the Opéra de Montréal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center, with adolescents in psychiatry, or, with the Share the Hope program, with children who have restricted access to cultural activities. .
For Nicolas Ellis, the problem is not so much the imposition of restrictions on the cultural milieu as the non-integration of the milieu into the plan of society.
“We have the impression that our Minister of Culture is completely isolated in the apparatus of government decisions, he believes. And this effect of lack of communication sends a more alarming message to the cultural milieu, on the importance that culture has within our society. What we want is a rich, culturally diverse and healthy society that will last and develop well. […] Does this vision of culture exist within the government? This is the cry of alarm that many artists and organizations are sounding. »