After having emptied all the wine cellars of the province with the Grandes Crues, Eve Côté launched her first solo tour on Wednesday evening, Eve sidea tribute to the speech of his native Gaspésie.
She would be, if we are to trust the voice-over that precedes her on stage, “the best thing to have come out of the Gaspé since dry cod”. She warns herself, a few minutes later, that she does not have “the most princely syntax”. Within the Grandes Crues, Eve Côté embodied, in a form that best recalled the era of cabarets, a certain affective and existential confusion of the women of her generation. She was the Denise of her Dodo, Marie-Lyne Joncas.
Eve side, her first solo show that she revealed to the media and her peers on Wednesday evening at the Olympia, offers a step back. It unfolds, like many early comedy shows, as a story of everything that preceded this big night, in the life of its star.
By quickly proclaiming herself “woman of the people”, the 30-year-old is also ahead of critics who could reproach her for her naughty language, which anchors most of her metaphors in the lower body.
In interview with The Press, Eve Côté said this week that she had already been compared to a meeting between Caxtonian Fred Pellerin and American Amy Schumer. From the second, it is really only due to a complete absence of embarrassment in pronouncing certain words used to name what is under the panties – you would benefit from going your way if the explicit designation of the female or male reproductive systems, and of what surrounds them upsets you.
The comedian has surprisingly much more in common with the Quebec storyteller and with his way of forging in the inventive vernacular of his corner of the country expressions to sleep outside, which provoke the most frank laughs of the evening – the regionalisms of Fabien Cloutier also come to mind.
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Her syntax is indeed nothing princely, but her agile language work makes her the liveliest of commoners.
In memory of Vachon cakes
Eve Côté cheerfully makes fun of the characters who inhabit her native Gaspésie, but always without malice, she who exalts a vision of the regions of Quebec where the spirit of community would triumph over individualism. Her vibrant memory of the days when she accompanied her cake delivery father Vachon on his tour of the Gaspé neighborhoods is the pretext for a moving return to the wonder of childhood, the main ingredient of the show’s most beautiful number.
Her listing of the various sweet delights marketed by the mythical bakery bears witness to what Eve Côté knows how to do best: to evoke with tenderness and teasing the warmth of a time of simple happiness and solid ties between the inhabitants of the same city.
Signed Joël Legendre, the staging also belongs to another era, but not necessarily for the better. With its sung tableaux, musical comedy style, its fades to black cutting out each number and its not always useful decorative elements (a staircase placed in the center turns into a truck or a kitchen table), Eve side sometimes seems to reach us from the mid-1990s.
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
There is of course no reason to erect the purity of the stand up American style (stool, microphone, bottle of water) in religion, as some comedians do, especially since Quebec humor has always drawn from different traditions. But the art of stand up rests first and foremost on the ability of an artist to hatch universes with only words and his body as tools, to give the impression that he is thinking aloud, in the familiar tone of a conversation between friends, and not that he delivers a learned text.
Eve Côté is obviously capable of it. She could easily get rid of what, in this show, belongs more to the theater and creates a sort of distance between her audience and her.
Her distrust of men, her years of hockey, her discovery of alcohol: Eve Côté zigzags between different subjects, with the red thread of a conception of the family as the foundation of her identity and her values. But each of the portraits she paints of members of the household of her youth struggles to transcend the stage of the archetype.
A slideshow of photos of his relatives, projected at the end of the curtain, suddenly gave life, for real, to his gallery of characters, a family that we would like to know better. Which is probably only a postponement, the special place that Eve Côté occupies in that of Quebec humor is beyond doubt.
Eve side
On tour everywhere in Quebec