La Fête Nationale du Québec on the Plains of Abraham (June 23, 2018) : a foreigner's experience

If you ever find yourself in Quebec city on June 23 in the evening, do what the locals do: go see the free open air show in the city’s Plains of Abraham park on the high shore of the Saint-Lawrence river, because it’s the national holiday and the show is grand.

To attend “le grand spectacle” for the National Day (La Fête Nationale) in Quebec city, has been a dormant plan of mine for a few years, and this summer finally all the stars aligned (both metaphorically and literally) and here we were, in Quebec city, on June 23.

It is striking how easy it is to spot the Quebeckers and the foreigners on this day: the same afternoon sees the local people marching from various city directions to the former battlefield carrying their blue-and-white flags in various interesting ways (pinning the smaller ones in their hair and wrapping themselves in bigger ones as in capes), many with their folding chairs in hands, while the tourists are walking in the opposite direction along the Grande Allee, towards the Old City, right past the Plains entrance.

There are exceptions of course. A group of Polish tourists (a man and three women) were standing by the entrance, the man trying to convince the women to go check out where all the people were going: “Let's just take a look!” The women were not finding this idea too exciting: “But what’s there?..” I hope the man managed to convince them, because “there” was the coolest thing you could see that evening. But let me tell you about the rehearsals first.

In quite an unbelievable move, the show organizers opened the rehearsals for a few final hours on the day of the show. Having talked to different people about it in preparations for the trip I discovered that there are two types of show-goers: the ones who think there are better things to do than to see rehearsals and the ones who can’t actually think of a better thing to do. If you are the second type like me, you would understand why I was at the entrance gate by 3:00 along with just a handful of other people and a cute bow-tied doggy named Lizou...

Now just to convey the scale of the preparations for the show, I should mention that one could hear the music from the Plains since morning that day as well as the day before. So, when we were allowed to approach the stage, the rehearsals were well underway. The air was filled up with “J'ai chanté dans la rue et au centre National des aaaaarts!..”  The distance from the gate to the stage seemed endless…

It was fun. The production was huge, lots of people performing or managing various technical parts of the show and all knew perfectly what they were doing, and they were doing it well.

It was another quick course in today's Quebec’s showbis who is who for me. There were some performers I knew, some I knew in name only, and some I never heard of. All of them were troopers. People of various ages (from the almost-22-year old Emile Bilodeau to the almost-84-year old Jean-Pierre-Ferland) were all working with the same enthusiasm and patience on that hot summer afternoon.

The presence of the public didn’t seem to have any effect on the performers, except Daniel Lavoie would return a smile and a wave to an eager fan and Garou… oh, Garou actually acknowledged the presence of the public, he entertained the people and even greeted us all via his microphone. A sweetheart and a clown, a tireless entertainer, I saw clearly why he makes such a great MC.

But on to the videos. They are not the greatest quality, but they are there. Here is that La danse du smatte, the 1.5 takes of it. I didn't have a heart to edit out the pause between the takes, it's the best part of seeing the rehearsal:

Some serious chills went down my spine upon seeing Jean-Pierre Ferland himself enter the stage. He was radiant as ever, a benevolent king of the evening:

When Ferland’s T’es belle morphed into the ubiquitous Belle from Notre-Dame de Paris, for some reason it made me laugh (but I held on to my iPad):

Now I have heard Tension attention at least 2578 times, but in this version sounded like it was written just yesterday just for the show on the Plains:

When Garou, Annie Villeneuve and Corneille are getting this close to you, you must film:

Ferland's Envoyé à maison became this show’s earworm for me:

One of the thrills of attending a rehearsal is hearing performers do things that have nothing to do with the show. This group improvised a lot in the frequent periods of waiting. A instrumentalist would start a familiar melody, others would join him, and suddenly you hear a singer do a bit of a cover and with brio, like this Hymne à l'amour that Garou sang just for the heck of it:

And what about “le grand spectacle” itself? It was truly grand. It took me a while to process all I've seen and heard, so overwhealming it was. One thing for sure: when dozens of thousands of spectators gather on a former battlefield to listen to music and a few dozens of musicians hold absolute control over that crowd it's like a collective shamanic experience, the only kind of a group hypnosis I actually don't mind submitting myself to. Anyway, I had no idea if the show like that was for me, but turned out it was exactly for me, I love witnessing human superpowers.

The concept and the execution of the show were impeccable. Lots of Quebec (French-only) music, new and classic, all arranged in a jubilant way, loud and fast, designed to sweep thousands of spectators of their feet at an outdoor concert. No single performer really stood out, it was a tornado of music, light and color and best thing was the atmosphere and the feeling of being there.

What is Quebec without its sense of humor? My favorite moment of the show came when Garou and Gregory Charles were praising "the wonderful Quebec lyricists" while invoking all the non-lexical vocables used in famous Quebec songs (e. g. Vigneault's Tam ti delam tam ti dela dité dela di tam ti delam tam ti dela ditam...), and this actually went on for a while, until the brilliant Guylaine Tanguay topped it all with some incredible yodeling!

And how to describe the feeling when you hear a song for the first time in your life and realize that everyone around you knows it by heart, because everyone around you is shouting it at the top of their lungs? You feel very foreign... but also very privileged at the same time:

So after all that happy madness the climactic fireworks at the end of Isabelle Boulay's Les Yeux Au Ciel came precisely  at the right moment and felt like the most natural thing (Oh  yeah, how can you not have fireworks right at this moment?!)

And so, what is a foreigner doing at a national holiday celebration? I’ll answer with an anecdote. A lady asked me on the Plains of Abraham as I was heading for the show, Quebec’s Fleurdelisé in my hand:

-Where did you get the flag?
-I brought it with me from the United States...

The ridiculous answer contained the truth, and while obviously you never cease being a foreigner in a foreign country, you can still carry its colors in your hand and in your heart. And you can wave them vigorously on the Plains of Abraham. Would do it again in a heartbeat.