Seen on Instagram: in an issue that she recently presented at the Bordel Comédie Club, Virginie Fortin addresses spectators in Russian – a language she speaks not too badly, thank you – the time to do a little of what we call from crowd work. Arrests in the face of which the public generally remains silent, Russian speakers not being legion in the comic cabarets of the province.
This silence generally allows the comedian – that’s the goal – to conclude that her minor in Russian studies, which she was pursuing at McGill a little less than 15 years ago, was useless to her. Except that evening, when a woman seated in the front row, and who visibly masters Pushkin’s language very well, unexpectedly offered him an answer, which spoiled the expected punch, but which provoked everyone’s hilarity. the room.
Virginie Fortin, who has long dreamed of being a polyglot, and who killed the long hours of her pandemic by taking Portuguese courses online, does not think at all, in reality, that her minor in Russian studies, who conducted in 2007 to St. Petersburg for one session, was completely unnecessary. In fact, Virginie Fortin refuses to think in these terms. How, anyway, can we conclude that something is useful or not, when it remains impossible to offer a satisfactory answer to the question “Why do we exist?” The very one she submitted to her father when she was barely four years old. And which still monopolizes him three decades later.
“Just to exist, that flabergaste », She confided one Monday morning, in a café in La Petite-Patrie, her head as generous in metaphysical reflections as in long curly hair. “I am always inhabited by this feeling of still finding it bizarre what we are going through. [Comprendre : l’existence, en général.] Insofar as nothing is really used for nothing, where life is just passing the time until you die, what does that mean, to be used for something? No, Russian studies didn’t help me to be more productive in the sense that we understand it in the world in which we live. But why can’t I just decide that I want to study languages or literature, even if it’s no use? “
You will understand that Virginie Fortin continues in her second show, which she will refine all over Quebec until her media premiere in March 2022, the salutary work of existential zooming out started with Noise in the cosmos, in which she invited privileged Westerners like us not to take ourselves too seriously. We are just noise in the cosmos.
The elegant title of this new show, My feelings, deliberately evokes the one that could be worn by the memories of a star who does not have a bad self-esteem, or that of a novel by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, bearded gentlemen who were also tormented by the vast mystery of what we can do well here. Gentlemen that Virginie has of course read on the school benches.
“I think I recognized myself in their nihilism,” she remembers, while hastening to point out that she for her part has nihilism … happy? ” Yes ! I often say: “Who cares, it’s just life!” And my friends sometimes tell me that I deny, that I don’t confront my emotions, but that’s not it. I confronted my existential emptiness so much that I came to the conclusion that we shouldn’t care, that we had to stop stressing with everything, that life is a great game that it takes experiment as much as possible. “
Attention, the following contains a discloser. ” I read Anna karenina and I kinda recognized myself, but no, I’m not going to kill myself like her. I tell you, I have easy happiness. “
And me and me and me
Virginie Fortin wanted this second show to be “more silly and nono”. Better luck next time ? “I know there are many things that I talk about that can make people feel depressed. But despite myself, it became my trademark to talk about something deeply depressing and do something absurd about it. “
Whether to trust the accompanying press release My feelings, its content would be more personal than that of its predecessor, one of the rare first tours whose headliner did not engage in the exercise almost obliged to tell his first jobs, his first loves and his first chalet. Does this mean that we will have the opportunity to hear these precious anecdotes this time?
“That too, like the title, is a bit of a joke”, corrects the actress that we see this fall in the Club Soly and the Punch Club. “It’s true that I talk more about myself, that I’m less afraid to name my father now that I’m better known than him – it’s a joke, it’s a joke, it’s a joke ! -, but at the same time, I do not tell about my childhood in Boucherville with Bernard Fortin. “
I know there are many things that I talk about that can make people feel depressed. But despite myself, it became my trademark to talk about something deeply depressing and do something absurd about it.
If she chooses to say that it is a more personal show, it is above all because she knows too well that we only constantly talk about oneself, even… in spite of oneself. “I always have a modesty on that,” she said with a smile, aware that these noble scruples do not fit well with her choice of career. “I find it tasteless to just talk about yourself, but whatever I’m talking about, it’s still my obsessions. “Except that if all goes well,” people will recognize themselves not in the anecdote of what I am telling, but in the feelings that it evokes “. Like those old Russian novels that never cease to move, some 150 years after their publication.
Stunned, not engaged
Committed, Virginie Fortin? The label continues to stick to her skin, even though, as she herself says, “I’m not engaged, I’m just stunned”. “If I’m talking about subjects that may appear pseudo-engaged,” she adds, “it’s not to change things, it’s because I can’t believe certain things. When I say that Amazon employees are underpaid, it’s not hired, everyone thinks that, right? “
But being a woman, she notes, gives a political dimension to each of our choices, whether we want it or not. “I had written a number in which I said that if I presented myself at Everybody talks about it not wearing makeup, we would qualify it as a committed gesture. And there, this summer, Bianca Gervais went to Good evening ! no makeup, and we called it a militant gesture, it became the subject of the entire segment. It’s impossible for a woman not to wear makeup on TV without being told about it. So I don’t want to be involved or an activist, it’s the others who force me to be. “
The young dad who leads the interview asks the comedian what he should answer his daughter when she in turn asks him the question “Why do we exist?” “. “You just have to tell him that we exist to have the most fun possible. Or to bring her to see a performance by Virginie Fortin?