Photo — Caroline Laberge
Nine glass rooms are on full display. In six of them, women are revealed living in their private spaces. Each room corresponds to a song, and each song expresses an obsession, an anxiety, or a recurrent hope in the thoughts and writing of Nelly Arcan. Each song is delivered by a different woman. The seventh song—the lost song—is the song of the chorus, directed by a phantom character that intermittently creeps into the women’s private worlds. Though they are different from Nelly, each of these women embodies an aspect of the subjects explored in her writing.
Nelly Arcan was a woman exposed to the public eye, made vulnerable by both the scrutiny of others and her own lack of modesty. The power of the rhythm of her writing is striking. Emphasizing this, La fureur de ce que je pense is a collage of the author’s texts transposed into songs—a far cry from psychological theatre or biographical narrative. The show pays homage to Nelly Arcan, the author whose life was too short.
Nelly Arcan’s writing contains so much darkness that it’s often necessary to lift your eyes from the pages a moment for a break. One thinks, « My God, what suffering, what a raw outlook. And what doggedness, what toughness, what brightness there is in these eyes that have pierced through others like daggers. » Paradoxically, we then feel affection for this author who writes without pity or compassion. The momentum of the fury spit out in these hard, sharp words doesn’t mask the terror that this brillant woman—a prisoner to a sort of state of nonstop anxiety—felt when faced with the injustices of the human condition, the female condition, and situations of love. Flowing like a swiftly moving river, this writing constantly exposes the intensity of the suffering she felt in being herself and the amplitude of her unhappiness. This show is a song delivered by a chorus of six actresses and a dancer, all remarkable artists who are deeply rooted in life. At the end, a drunken young woman walks off into the night with her shoes in her hand. I imagine this delicate phantom going back home. She sleeps a bit and then wakes up full of life the next day.
