Photo — Érick Labbé
Between a lecture and a confidence, Robert Lepage recalls living on the 2nd floor to the left of 887 Murray Avenue in Quebec City, in the midst of the Quiet Revolution. He remembers his father, a longshoreman, then a sailor, then a taxi driver, whose elephant’s memory absorbed the names of the streets he crisscrossed by the hundreds at night in his car. He remembers the bombs of the Front de libération du Québec, and the soldiers dressed in shoddy camouflage posted in front of the notables’ doors during the October crisis. He may even be able to engrave his memory with the poem Speak White, in which Michèle Lalonde expresses in a thousand ways the eternity of a strike day.
887 Murray evokes a dollhouse. The prestigious limousine of the powerful of this world is reduced to the size of a thimble. The memories of a paperboy are magnified. A small figurine echoes the words of an illustrious general. At the meeting point of personal and global history, the perspective is jostled from all sides, and the past, the memories and the recollection suddenly take on new colors.
