Review: Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent

Time is of the essence, so if you are reading this on Monday, June 2, 2008 before 9pm, call 514.844.3822 and ask if there are still tickets available for tonight’s last performance of Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent. Otherwise, feel free to keep reading.

Loui Mauffette’s Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent, photo by Yves Renaud

Poésie is the brainchild of artistic director Loui Mauffette. The idea is rather simple: gather 24 performers to celebrate poetry around a long table, as if words were a banquet to feast on. And since the selection of poetry maintains the highest level of quality despite its wide variety of sources, it works. It’s not just the poetry of words that is being tackled here, but also that of music and dance. In less than 2 hours, we will experience Jim Morrison, St-Denis Garneau, Marie Chouinard, Arthur Rimbaud, Érik Satie, James Joyce, Émile Nelligan, Marguerite Duras, Léo Ferré, and many others.

The excitement could be felt as soon as one walks through the doors of the Cinquième Salle of Place des arts. The space has been reconfigured so that the audience is sitting all around the stage. In the middle, the long table, and next to it sits a piano. Under the table, a group of children playing with flashlights; above it, stacks of paper. Soon, the children emerge from under the table and start to throw all the paper in the air. An adult comes out and blows a whistle. The children stop dead in their tracks. About 20 other grownup performers come out… and proceed to throw the pages in the air as well.

Their joy is contagious. No, poetry is not stuffy, heavy, or dead, it is very much alive and the performers approach it as playfully as a bunch of kids in a sandbox. Who knew that choreographer Marie Chouinard is just as agile with words as with movement? Or that feminism could emerge from a man observing his wife sleeping in “Le vent de Sudbury” by Patrice Desbiens? Or that internet porn could be used to tap into the beauty of humanity in Patrice Brisebois’s “La beauté est dans la perversion”? And it is not only the beauty of the poetry that comes through but also that of the performers as the words pour out of their body. It is as if the genius of the words inscribes itself in the person who speaks it. To experience them is to be inhabited by them.

Multi-talented Clara Furey stands out, performing one of her compositions on the piano. She has a truly great and unique voice, so I won’t cheapen it by comparing her to any other female singer. She also dances a duo from Dave St-Pierre’s La Pornographie des âmes with Francis Ducharme. This piece alone makes the show worth the 38$ ticket.

Poésie is in French, but I would even recommend it to those who do not understand the language if only they are interested in the phonetic beauty of language. No, poetry is definitely not dead, and we can thank the people behind Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent for reminding us.

Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent plays one last time tonight (Monday), June 2, at 9pm at the Cinquième Salle of Place des arts. Tickets are 38$. For more information, call 514.844.3822. For more information on this and other FTA shows, visit www.fta.qc.ca