Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Les Filles Du Roi - Three Points of View

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Julie McIsaac - York Theatre, Vancouver, May 17 2018

As a Buenos Aires-born Latin American I have gone far and long in my quest to understand that North American experiment that is the musical. Perhaps I must thank my exposure to all those musicals I have seen at the Arts Club Theatre to finally realize that musicals don’t always just entertain.

That was the case in last year’s Corey Payette musical The Children of God and this year in the same location, at the Cultch’s York Theatre for Les Filles Du Roi.

Dazzling Movement at the Children of God
You have guilt, I have sorrow

After the play (opening last night Thursday May 17, 2018) when Rosemary and I returned I did not immediately go to sleep. I thought of 1962 when my mother raved about Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet ( Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive & Clea). These four separate novels are about the same events but seen by three different points of view in the first three novels). My mother had taught me something that would serve me well in my years to come

In this 21^st century where facts and truths are hazy I have come to the conclusion that “point of view” is of supreme importance. By weighing these looks from different directions and by different persons the collective approaches some sort of truth.

Corey Payette and Julie McIsaac’s (Book and Lyrics) musical Le Filles Du Roi looks at the events in the 17^th century in the French settlements in Canada when the Sun King decided that vast land had to be populated. He sent women in ships for that task.

Les Filles Du Roi has two principal points of view (and a few more small ones). One view is from the white man who is out to “save” the savages. The other view is of the Mohawks (Kanien'kehá:ka) who do not understand that concept and are just fine the way they are. After all the sparse country that is their land is populated enough.

There is a third point of view that for me is also important. The famous photograph of Nazi “publicist” Joseph Goebbels taken byAlfred Eisenstaedt in 1933 is famous because we look at it from a future in which the horrors that occurred we see in retrospect in Goebbels formidable gaze.

For me having been raised a Roman Catholic and sent to a Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas and lovingly adoring (in spite of my lapsness) our Argentine Jesuit pope, I was pleased to observe that Andrew Cohen (who played the villainous Clarke) in his stand-in role as the Jesuit (Clark told me that being a Cohen he was not a Jesuit but a Jewisit!) played him innocuously good.

This musical is in the standard (and most necessary) three-act structure of 1. Introduction of characters, 2. Introduction of conflict 3. Resolution. It entertains but it challenges.

Because Payette gently eased me out to the door on Wednesday’s media call I was not able (thank you Mr. Payette!) to discern the startling resolution in which one of the damning villains Madame Savoie (a sort of bitchy nun, that wasn’t a nun who reminded me of Lana Turner’s nasty Milady in The Three Musketeers) played by Laura Di Cicco has a change of heart.

It was only after re-reading my program notes that I found out that the co-book and co-lyric Julie McIsaac also plays the lead Mari-Jeanne Lespérance, a Filles du Roi whose only sin was to refuse to drink tainted water on the sea voyage from La Rochelle. She and Kaitlyn Yott as the Mohawk sister Kateri (the use of squaw here would damn me) of Jean-Baptiste played by Raes Calvert, are very good singers who happen to know how to act.

I have no idea if two musicals from Payette can form a visual pattern for me. As a photographer who has refused to ever shoot videos I was transfixed by my amateurish swirls of the dance scenes at ¼ second. In them I noticed a wonderful pattern of excellence in Production Design, set costumes, props by Marshall McMahen and lighting design, Jeff Harrison in which I could see this play hearing impaired and still being able to enjoy all the visuals.

But I must return to my point of view, point of view. In 1985 (I arrived in Vancouver in 1975) one of the first Canadian books I ever read was Black Robe by Brian Moore. This novel is about the events in the time of Les Filles du Roi as seen by a Jesuit priest. I wrote about it here.

And lastly I could not leave out the music. It is catchy, it is lovely and the four musicians, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, piano, Molly McKinnon, violin, Rebecca Wenham, cello (I have photographed all three at one time) and John Kastelic, viola and pump organ are very good. Some my have noticed that Wenham did tap and bang on her cello (percussively) in some of the songs. But perhaps fewer would know that Wenham who is part of Marc Destrubé's Microcosmos Quartet is expert at this after all, all the Bartok Quartets that Microcosmos has played in the last couple of years involve lots of that!

Link to: Les Filles Du Roi - Three Points of View

I traced the line of the horizon, thin and fine

Friday, May 18, 2018

On the ferry to Port Townsend, Washington

While I was born in Buenos Aires, lived and Mexico and now live in Vancouver, my education has been thoroughly American.

In Buenos Aires and in Mexico City I went to American schools. I attended a two-room school house in Nueva Rosita that followed an American program. My mother (who steered me toward British authors) was the teacher. I went to a Catholic boarding school in Texas and then to an American university in Mexico City.

While my reading habits in the last 30 years have gravitated to reading in Spanish authors who wrote in Spanish, it is thanks to my American education that today, Wednesday 16, 2018 I read about Edna St. Vincent Millay here in the New York Times and not only did I know who she was but I remember some of her work. And there is Robert Frost, James Thurber, E.B. White, O’Henry, Emily Dickinson, Williams Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Kurt Vonnegut and scores of other American writers that I have seemed to grow up with.

I have no idea if this American background has served me well. My knowledge of Canadian letters is still sparse. I have a better knowledge of the literature of Mexico and from the very beginning of my later youth the works of Jorge Luís Borges and Julio Cortázar have always been near my bed table.

The article in the New York Times is about St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York and how funding to keep it open to interested tourists is in jeopardy. The piece finishes with this poem commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post in 1950 to commemorate Thanksgiving:

From the apprehensive present, from

a future packed

With unknown dangers, monstrous

terrible and new –

Let us turn for comfort to this simple

fact;

We have been in trouble before…and

we came through.

The piece mentions her first published poem (she was 20) called Renascence. I looked it up, fell for it and I knew that I had a couple of photographs that could illustrate it.

Renascence

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I'd started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;

These were the things that bounded me;

And I could touch them with my hand,

Almost, I thought, from where I stand.

And all at once things seemed so small

My breath came short, and scarce at all.

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;

Miles and miles above my head;

So here upon my back I'll lie

And look my fill into the sky.

And so I looked, and, after all,

The sky was not so very tall.

The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,

And—sure enough!—I see the top!

The sky, I thought, is not so grand;

I 'most could touch it with my hand!

And reaching up my hand to try,

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity

Came down and settled over me;

Forced back my scream into my chest,

Bent back my arm upon my breast,

And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass

Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound

Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The Universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence

But could not,—nay! But needs must suck

At the great wound, and could not pluck

My lips away till I had drawn

All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

All sin was of my sinning, all

Atoning mine, and mine the gall

Of all regret. Mine was the weight

Of every brooded wrong, the hate

That stood behind each envious thrust,

Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,

Each suffering, I craved relief

With individual desire,—

Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire

About a thousand people crawl;

Perished with each,—then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;

He moved his eyes and looked at me;

I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,

And knew his hunger as my own.

I saw at sea a great fog bank

Between two ships that struck and sank;

A thousand screams the heavens smote;

And every scream tore through my throat.

No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath

That, crying, met an answering cry

From the compassion that was I.

All suffering mine, and mine its rod;

Mine, pity like the pity of God.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite Me!

My anguished spirit, like a bird,

Beating against my lips I heard;

Yet lay the weight so close about

There was no room for it without.

And so beneath the weight lay I

And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,

When quietly the earth beneath

Gave way, and inch by inch, so great

At last had grown the crushing weight,

Into the earth I sank till I

Full six feet under ground did lie,

And sank no more,—there is no weight

Can follow here, however great.

From off my breast I felt it roll,

And as it went my tortured soul

Burst forth and fled in such a gust

That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;

Cool is its hand upon the brow

And soft its breast beneath the head

Of one who is so gladly dead.

And all at once, and over all

The pitying rain began to fall;

I lay and heard each pattering hoof

Upon my lowly, thatched roof,

And seemed to love the sound far more

Than ever I had done before.

For rain it hath a friendly sound

To one who's six feet underground;

And scarce the friendly voice or face:

A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come

And speak to me in my new home.

I would I were alive again

To kiss the fingers of the rain,

To drink into my eyes the shine

Of every slanting silver line,

To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze

From drenched and dripping apple-trees.

For soon the shower will be done,

And then the broad face of the sun

Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth

Until the world with answering mirth

Shakes joyously, and each round drop

Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.

How can I bear it; buried here,

While overhead the sky grows clear

And blue again after the storm?

O, multi-colored, multiform,

Beloved beauty over me,

That I shall never, never see

Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,

That I shall never more behold!

Sleeping your myriad magics through,

Close-sepulchred away from you!

O God, I cried, give me new birth,

And put me back upon the earth!

Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd

And let the heavy rain, down-poured

In one big torrent, set me free,

Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and through the breathless hush

That answered me, the far-off rush

Of herald wings came whispering

Like music down the vibrant string

Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!

Before the wild wind's whistling lash

The startled storm-clouds reared on high

And plunged in terror down the sky,

And the big rain in one black wave

Fell from the sky and struck my grave.

I know not how such things can be;

I only know there came to me

A fragrance such as never clings

To aught save happy living things;

A sound as of some joyous elf

Singing sweet songs to please himself,

And, through and over everything,

A sense of glad awakening.

The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,

Whispering to me I could hear;

I felt the rain's cool finger-tips

Brushed tenderly across my lips,

Laid gently on my sealed sight,

And all at once the heavy night

Fell from my eyes and I could see,—

A drenched and dripping apple-tree,

A last long line of silver rain,

A sky grown clear and blue again.

And as I looked a quickening gust

Of wind blew up to me and thrust

Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—

I know not how such things can be!—

I breathed my soul back into me.

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I

And hailed the earth with such a cry

As is not heard save from a man

Who has been dead, and lives again.

About the trees my arms I wound;

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;

I raised my quivering arms on high;

I laughed and laughed into the sky,

Till at my throat a strangling sob

Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb

Sent instant tears into my eyes;

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e'er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass

But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,

Nor speak, however silently,

But my hushed voice will answer Thee.

I know the path that tells Thy way

Through the cool eve of every day;

God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

Source: Renascence and Other Poems (1917)

I found another poem that delighted me.

First Fig - Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

Somehow it reminded me of Emily Dickinson and I smiled.

Link to: I traced the line of the horizon, thin and fine