Douze hommes rapaillés : an outsider's view. (Quebec City, July 11, 2011 Festival d'été de Québec)

Photo credit: Agence Spectra

One goes to a lot of shows during lifetime, but some stay in memory in every detail, years later, as if you saw them yesterday. Douze hommes rapaillés at the Québec City Summer Festival in 2011 became one of those shows for me, although, curiously enough I was by no means the target audience for it (not being French-Canadian).  

The show was part of the Festival's open air program, and that was, to my knowledge, the first time Douze hommes were performed under the open sky (a perfect option for it, in my opinion), in the Parc de la Francophonie which is still being unofficially called by its historical name Pigeonnier. It was a standing room only affair and the park was filled to the brim.
 
By now that version of the show has become a classic and an almost-complete televised version is available, so I will skip the description of the format. 

To this day I remember fondly the heat, the humidity, the sound volume, the public’s “podorythmie”, the sudden storm of applause for Richard Séguin's line "Québec ma terre amère ma terre amande", Yann Perreau's vest, Michel Rivard's thick-rimmed glasses, Louis-Jean Cormier's battery of guitars, Daniel Lavoie's light (more on that in a separate post), and the feeling of something extraordinarily intimate happening between the people on stage and the ones in the audience throughout the evening. 

Of course it was a brilliant concept to bring together all those 12 very different artists, not just singers and composers, but like Gaston Miron himself, poets and people with strong views on French-Canadian cultural and political situation, some of them Quebec's legends in their own right. Together on stage they created an energy of rare magnitude and you didn't have to be a quebecois to feel it.

The 12 men.
Source: http://storage.journaldemontreal.com/v1/dynamic_resize/sws_path/jdx-prod-images/eb2ee2f3-a4d3-453d-81ec-f749bfd7e032_ORIGINAL.jpg?quality=80&version=0&size=968x

To be fair, there was a 13-th equally memorable man on stage, and that was Mario Legaré, who played the double bass (or perhaps the double bass played him…)

In addition to the magnetism of the performers and the exceptionally strong poetic and musical material by Gaston Miron/Gilles Bélanger, the composition of the show was perfect (caveat: the televised version has the songs in a different order, but I am writing about the show that I saw at the Pigeonnier). They say that in a musical performance it's crucial to have a great opening and a great closure. In Douze hommes rapaillés both of these were brilliant. For the opening, Michel Faubert with his deeply accented La Corneille and his mad gusto gripped the audience immediately and paved the road for the others. 

And as for the finale... I confess, it brought me  to tears. Yves Lambert armed with his accordion and rolling his "r"s characteristically, started Retour a nulle part (a traditional-style rendition of a poem written after the defeat of the independence referendum of 1980). The rest of the men joined him in singing and gestured to the public inviting it to do the same, and soon it was one big patriotic chorus. And then the most striking thing happened: slowly the performers left the stage while the public was left singing - on its own! - about the hope that will not die… I think that moment of public taking over the performance (or rather the performance spilling over into the real life) was one of the strongest and most poignant theatrical experiences I had, and although it's not my country these people sang for, but I find the ideas of national and cultural independence very easy to rely to. So yes, my voice was in that choir too.

P. S. Back there and then I had no idea what a long-lasting impact the show would have on me, I had no idea that years later I'd be saying that "all I know about Quebec I learned from Douze hommes rapaillés". Poetry rules, M. Miron.