In search of a metaphor for the construction of La Place des Arts
Had there been no explosion, there would be no Place des Arts.
The cultural movement known as le Nouvel-Ontario was born in a big bang. It was a resounding explosion of culture, an amazing upwelling of creation. It was fostered by an entire generation through an act of will. And it fostered their longing to be born.
Abandoned by Québec’s Quiet Revolution, the Franco-Ontarian community took charge of its own fate through what was cheekily portrayed as a “serene revolution.” Originating in Sudbury, the movement took root, sprouted offshoots and is still influential today. It lives on in the form of a creative lineage that keeps us true to ourselves and our symbolic birthplace.
Why is le Nouvel-Ontario a birthplace? Because it’s where many foundational components of French Ontario first appeared. First professional theatre company. First publishing house. First province-wide popular music festival. First art gallery.
The emergence of a wide-ranging cooperative arts movement called le Grand CANO ushered in a new sense of belonging and identity. The feeling sprang forth from our ‘New Ontario’ homeland, our history, our stories and our youthful impulse. An artists’ collective felt the urgent need to create and name their inventive workplace. Through the Coopérative des artistes du Nouvel-Ontario (CANO), they achieved an unprecedented and momentous extension of their sphere of resonance. They founded institutions that provided new means for ongoing cultural expansion. Even organizations not directly linked to the CANO movement, like Théâtre Action and Northern Lights Festival Boréal, trace their origins back to this explosion of artistic expression and transmission.
It’s not every day that one witnesses the birth of a new literature, a new theatre, a new style of singer-songwriters, a new visual esthetic, along with new forms of community creativeness and new human rhythms to the seasons. The happening was impressive enough to make Laure Hesbois (a Belgian-born professor of literature and linguistics at Laurentian University) declare later on that it forced her to call into question her understanding of the defining principles of literature. By and large, Le Nouvel-Ontario’s artistic proposition was based on oral expressiveness. Its desire to name its realities all in one go was straightforward, bighearted, engaging, and gave spectators close access to the creative act. It required little more than an interest in human experience and a sense of the new spirit unexpectedly arising in a harsh environment with very little cultural infrastructure.
A new world begins
Our birth story is remarkable in this respect: the movement was very conscious of its pioneering significance. The event of our birth was as willful as it was improbable. A forsaken runt of the litter had to invent its own mother. We were very aware that we were emerging into a deficient environment, a lost land, a nowhere with next to no means to resonate in the outside world. We had to invent everything in a newly invented territory. Creativity therefore became our way of being. It was the defining manifestation of our will to exist.
The professor and essayist Fernand Dorais wrote that we had only one path to survival. Because we are a politically insignificant minority scattered across a vast area, only creativity and self-expression could allow us to construct our own meaningful space and to claim a territory in which our own possibilities could emerge. To Quebeckers, Gilles Vigneault had sung “our country is winter.” But for us, our country would be the notion of le Nord, the North.
In ‘winter as country’ sung by Vigneault, there is an expectation of immanent spring. For le Nord as country, there can be no such expectation. It will never be more than a horizon, a sense of future, a place of hope. It is a homeland that exists only in shared action, in moments when it is rediscovered and reawakened.
Le Nouvel-Ontario is real and imagined, historical and potential, a protective cocoon and a boundless horizon. It is a place of creation and transformation, a space to be endlessly reinvented, a way to be present in the here and now. In the words of the poet and ‘grand vizir’ Robert Dickson, Au Nord de notre vie, nous vivrons: We shall live to the North of our lives.
And what did Gargantua holler as soon as he was born? “Give me to drink!” These were times when all roads led young coteries to a favorite pub or bar ― the President, the Coulson, the Whistle Stop, the Vesta Café, the Nash (National Hotel), la Salle d’urgence (The Emergency Room), various outdoor patios ― where young artists partied with purpose.
One artwork at a time
In the years following that big bang, territories were explored, geographies were compiled, wounds were inspected. Early watchwords were coined: Dépêche-toi soleil (Hurry up, sun), Molière Go Home. We will not be looked down upon.
Wordsmiths provided abris nocturnes, night havens. Aprons were donned for La cuisine de la poésie ‘poetry kitchen’ performances. Cris et blues were recorded. A steady stream of people and places populated our realm: Frenchtown, Lucky Lady, Strip, Nickel, Le Nickel Strange. A way too oddly familiar Homme invisible / The Invisible Man appeared and disappeared in the fray. Aspiring to be was a moral imperative.
Along the way, we gained a few bullhorns. Radio-Canada bowed to insistent demands for a regional radio station. A new university student newspaper, L’Orignal déchaîné (The Moose on the Loose), rammed headfirst into those who should know better, yet know nothing. Ill-fated bookstores tried and failed and still await their hour. The social media phenomenon Ta gueule! (Shut Up!) scratched a UFO-like streak across the sky of the times.
Continuity and commemoration are hallmarks of our lineage. Luc Robert’s drawings. Cid Michaud’s huge collection of 30 000 photos of the big bang era. Normand Renaud wandering around Northern Ontario to salute and save the backcountry with nothing more than a microphone for the stories and the parlance of its people. Visual artist Laurent Vaillancourt’s archeological pilgrimage along Highway 11 with Michel Ouellette as his scribe. André Perrier staging the poetry of Patrice Desbiens with the voice and poise of Belgian actor Alain Doom. Singer-songwriter Cindy Doire discovering Desbiens, who would soon write words of remembrance for the sorely missed Robert Dickson, as Dickson himself had written earlier for André Paiement. Producer Dan Bedard channeling the talents of spirited singer-showman Stef Paquette. Patricia Cano’s voice and music for multiple indigeneities. Michel Dallaire’s poetry burning bridges in a search for true belonging. Jean Marc Dalpé’s writings scattered in a rising wind. Gaston Tremblay’s logbook carefully collating memories of our earliest eventful times. Inspiration and aspiration are not in short supply.
Les contes sudburois’ public performance of the Nickel City’s urban tales. Alain Doom’s neurinoma straddling childhood memories and present-day anguish. Varge’s screeching rock. Thierry Dimanche’s geopoetics. Miriam Cusson’s auto-fictional affiliations from Madeleine Azzola and Hélène Gravel to Brigitte Haentjens and Robert Dickson. Alt-rocker Christian Berthiaume hanging on tight to Daniel Aubin’s kite and Dickson’s dystopian images. Poets Guylaine Tousignant and Éric Charlebois orbiting through Sudbury. Photographer Mariana Lafrance exposing the magic of city lanes and alleyways. The poetic vitality of Sonia Lamontagne and Daniel Groleau. Aurélie Lacassagne embracing and upholding her adoptive home, a world away from her native France.
Indeed, it’s important to note that a key aspect of the phenomenon is its power of attraction, even though retention does not always ensue. Le Nouvel-Ontario has shown its ability to adopt and enrich good people from many horizons. Brigitte Haentjens, Yolande Jimenez, Claudine Moïse, Alain Doom, Didier Kabagema, Melchior Mbonimpa all found a welcoming place and played their part in the phenomenon without having to forget or to stifle who they are. Welcome back, Molière, but now it’s on our terms. We prize openness and sensitivity. We seek bliss in lively language and vivid voices.
From 1971 to 2018, il n’y a pas de décalage, there is no misalignment. Rather, there is an unwritten tradition of lineage, which even extends to the business culture of our institutions, from the managerial abilities of the Jesuits to those of Yvan Rancourt, from the community-building skills of Monique Cousineau to those of Paulette Gagnon. We have always been true to a certain way of being present to ourselves and to our world. Our faithfulness bears witness to our lineage. We have our way of standing proud and tall.
while wavelets
cheerily chitchat
their poetry
like jewels
on the beach
Patrice Desbiens, Décalage (our translation)
A brave wave (the ripple effect)
In Northern Ontario and in Sudbury, City of Lakes, rippling wavelets in water are a familiar, comforting and meditative image. The impact of a body diving headfirst into calm waters produces multiple concentric circles, a series of rings made of wavelets with crests and hollows. This invigorating and expanding movement originates in an act of will, a sudden intrusion into a different environment.
In the case of the Nouvel-Ontario movement, the ensuing wave rippled across the whole province. Sudbury is the birthplace of the Franco-Ontarian identity. Lineage and faithfulness have ensured that the ripple effect continues to this day.
waves burst on rocks then withdraw
like inspiration expiration
love bursts in hearts with a joyful cry
like a child in water
permission papers in hand
poetry is sitting on the rock facing violence
and faced with the landscape’s temporary peace
Robert Dickson, Humains paysages en temps de paix relative (our translation)
Bursting against nothingness, the wave is brave. This form, this collective image of a pioneering plunge, is somewhat eccentric. That’s because those who first got wet were basically a marginal group unrelated to any Ontarian mainstream. But the movement reveals its inner logic, like a fractal: it always comes home, back to the shore of its lake of origin. Le Nouvel-Ontario has become an anchor and a source of inspiration, yet all the while wondering: “Where are we headed?”
We are far from the arrowhead sashes of old. Now, in a sign of our times and our maturation, interpretative works are contributing to the effort to build bridges of meaning. François Paré has inventoried the exiguities of minorities and developed theories of cultural fragility. Joel Beddows and denise truax have meticulously compiled the ‘partitions of an era.’ Lucie Hotte, Johanne Melançon and others of their academic ilk have shed light on underlying motifs in enduring writings.
The great gathering
And all that is why we’re here. Seven sister organizations, coming together in a new centre, in the middle of our still underdeveloped homeland. Together we stand on a new shore. Together we sit, after lengthy portages, at a table yet to be garnished in a house both old and new. We’ll cart in our crates and unpack our past and future dreams. We’ll throw a housewarming party. And then, borrowing words from poet Thierry Dimanche, “we will feel the need to complete our invention.”
Every time we pass the threshold of this Place des arts, we will expect to learn the latest news about ourselves, our tomorrows, our next new horizon. In this space designed for encounters and experiences, every day will challenge us to pull off yet another learning event for a yearning world. We must charm, move and transfix the hearts and minds of our audiences. We must kindle the sacred flame. We must teach apprentice sorcerers the art of suspending time’s flight. We must be ready and willing to often lose our bearings.
We will be free to be apart from our times, not part of the mainstream. We will be invitingly daring and defiant. We will celebrate and cogitate. We will be guarded yet generous, determined yet derisive. We will craft new metaphors. Art and culture have the power to part waters and burn boundaries. We will speak and our speech will be our best ambassador. We will always be our own best hope.
Emergence
We therefore need to visualize a built structure that emerges from the landscape as if some of its forms have been there forever as a natural part of the urban environment, like “the rock pregnant with holy poetry”, to quote Desbiens. But also like the aftermath of an impact, a cultural big bang rippling bravely and endlessly through time. We need to visualize a building bursting at the seams, like a reverberation, a wave on which to ride from past to future.
In essence, we must build a place that can capture and disseminate our energy.
Like an olympic diver
on his springboard
I raise cupped hands
towards the sky-blue bowl.
I close my eyes and
naked and soulless
I dance a little jig
into eternity.
Patrice Desbiens, Désâmé
Had there been no explosion, we would have no city, no Nouvel-Ontario. Had there been no divers, we would have no brave waves, no lineage, no torch to pass, no place for the arts.
Stéphane Gauthier
