Mid afternoon. Outside, spring among the cranes, the Gesù seems out of reach. Entrance. Reassuring familiarity, mixed with strangeness. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, huh Gesù? More than two years. Émile Proulx-Cloutier arrived at the same time, we opened the door. He sits at a distance, a table from a distance, masked. The great hall is the same, yet there is nothing normal about it. Health caution. And then the war, above all. Especially the war. There in Ukraine, we fight, we suffer, we die. In five hours, Emile will sing, the room will be full of people who know. The chance to be at the Gesù. Desire in the heart and fear in the stomach.
It changes everything, right? ” Yes and no. The conception and birth of the show took place in November 2021. I gave it away fifteen times, to have it well in hand, until February. Tonight, I’m presenting the same show as in November. Of course, I reread it and feel it differently. But I swear on my children’s heads that I didn’t change the monologues or the lyrics of the songs. Not a word. And yet, obviously, everything is perceived differently, in the circumstances. “The words themselves have changed. The load is different. »
A few moments of an equally charged silence pass. “I don’t think that the mission of art is to get us out of reality,” he continues, widening his gaze. “The role of art is not to tell us how to behave, nor to give us the right reading of the world. We don’t have to lead the way! The word echoes in the hall. Émile gave voice. “Art is situated in this disturbing space where we are revealed to ourselves, where we highlight our vertigo, our desires, our paradoxes. He reflects, searches for the right metaphor. Find her. “It’s a bit like a tree. Must be rooted in the world, and at the same time have the branches pitched skyward and try to have access to what escapes us a little every day. »
Collisions, coincidences and confluences
Life happens when it happens. It happens for Émile Proulx-Cloutier that Not lost / scenic documentaries, the multimedia project on which Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and him have been working for three years, is created this month: it has been happening since March 8 and it continues, with additional ones, until the beginning of April. And it happens thatWith bare hands, the new spectacle of songs, slams and tales that brings us to the Gesù, takes place so to speak at the same time, “literally rides”, as Émile says, from this Thursday, March 17 until the beginning of May. “I have already experienced pileups of agenda, but nothing like that. »
Two heads in his head, colliding. Fragile and uncertain end of pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine, also colliding. Arrivals in the world at the edge of the end of the world. “All the same, let’s put things into perspective. I feel extremely privileged to live so intensely this month and the following ones. It is happiness. It’s horror there. »
The show
In the half hour before going on stage, the spectators dance a small ballet of avoidance. Hall of Ghosts, Ball of Masks. Eyes do not meet. At most we whisper, two by two. Once seated, and above all, once darkness has fallen in the room, things are better. Caution again, the awareness of side-by-side foreign bodies does not really fade away.
Behind his grand piano, Émile Proulx-Cloutier first offers a love song, fragile and filled with hope: small suitcase. We quickly arrived at what is the essence of the show: the unpublished. Of the sixteen titles on offer, half do not yet exist on disc. The torch. Many words to be received all at once. We catch what does not give the choice to be caught. Bribes: “Here we put lids on volcanoes […] Life it cracks its violence between the winters […] If you come back alive, you will be a scout.” It’s not about the war. And that’s exactly about the war.
The big volcano, an increasingly fast-paced slam, describes a waitress who “works in the last bar of a small town in the north of the world” and who can no longer wait for love, the great volcano . Enumeration of disappointments: “Leech loves, one-way loves / Broken down loves, panicked loves”. Word games, hand games, naughty games. That, too, is a kind of war in which no one wins. A war of attrition and use.
Inspiration and breathing
The beautiful bomb “which ticks in the hollow of people” threatens to explode at any moment, as long as the boogie rolls in a loop on the piano, we are safe. Strong opinions, violent slam, denounces the squabbles of social networks: “Each in his little straitjacket, his little Vatican / Who says: choose your side, choose your side”. We measure the insignificance of “trench opinions” because we necessarily think of the real trenches. A more than loaded word: a word from the Great War. “Above all, don’t provide ammunition to fools…”
We laugh a lot during this show, you don’t hear much in these quotes, but the man of the theater-songwriter knows how to vary his effects, responds more than skillfully to the slightest word coming from the room. We laugh out loud, sometimes with a good heart, it’s a show that is beneficial and confronting at the same time. When Emile sings The space-saving child, we think it’s a show to get out of the spacesuit. An hour and a half of inspiration and breathing. And if there is a terrible tale towards the end, a great “fishing story” that ends in a fall, an allegory of the madness of men who make children bear the “burden” of survival, there is also the very, very tender Crack hearts “I say it while everyone is listening / I love you all”.