What can be hotter than having your brain igniedted? The WinterWorks festival brings thought provoking and experimental works to Montreal. Among them is Fano Maddix, an Acadian storyteller whose shows offer a queer-eye on old folktales. Conte Bright Comme Une Diamond is the retelling of an old Acadian folktale about Ti-Jean and a half-human/half-pigeon creature and their adventures with grandmothers, fairies, flying islands, and magical sex work. It’s not the story your mémère told… or is it?
“The tale feels like a dream,” Maddix says. “It’s about one of three boys. Two are like their father and the third child is different and likes to play cards. He loses a gamble and has one year and one day to find a red bonnet. He lives a quest that his brothers will never understand.” Ti-Jean is helped out by magical creatures. Although, as Maddix says, only half of the story is about Ti-Jean. The other half is about the half-human/half-pigeon creature.
Maddix explains that this particular story has been told for over 1000 years in different cultures. In Acadian culture, it was popular until the ’50s when tales stopped being widespread. Maddix dove deep into the archives, listening to audio files and old recordings and chanced upon this one. “I chose this one because it’s something we can connect with today,” they say. “Right now it’s relevant.” In Maddix’s version, the characters and the plot are maintained, but when it comes to certain scenes, “We look at it up close and play with it.”
The relevancy of the folktale comes in part from how the symbols and scenes capture the human experience. “There’s something really important about telling folktales,” Maddix says. “It’s not something that’s crystallized in the past. This folktale and its symbols helps me to make sense of my own life. At one point, Ti-Jean has to cut a piece of his ass off to feed an eagle in order to get to where he needs to go, and sometimes in life, it’s just like that. Sometimes you have to cut something off from yourself to make it somewhere. You’ve arrived and made it, and now you absolutely have a piece of yourself missing.”
Maddix also points out that there is a misconception about folklore as being a part of a patriarchal past. They say, “One of the angles of being a queer person and having the right to be engaged with the folktales of my culture is that it is healing. It permits the crowd to see queer cracks that already exist in the tale. There’s a perspective that is contained in the story that has always been there, [a perspective] that the far right tells us is invented recently. But if you look in nature and see nature every day you know that’s not true. Folktales are similar to nature. There are queer examples in folktales that have been told for thousands of years. This tale has many queer perspectives. For example, the half human/ half pigeon is trans-species.”
Of course, folktales and oral tradition depends upon the teller to elicit certain facets of the story. Maddix specifies that when seen through their eyes, audiences will get their unique perspective. “For me, the act of storytelling is not like there theatre, where I’m being a character. I’m not playing someone else. For me, it’s me telling the story. A lot of the process of this creation is what does it mean, how does it change when I tell this tale. How does it evolve as I tell it as a queer person or as a fairy. And since the flourishment of my queerness is evolving, it’s completely changed my way of telling tales, because I’ve changed. It’s a lot easier to see the queerness of the story through a queer performer. Ti-Jean being different from his brothers and then having to do something different with his life means something different when a queer person tells the story than if a straight person does. Everyone understands that Ti-Jean is different.”
Maddix doesn’t develop their work alone, but considers it central to work with other artists for their insights. Maddix says, “Talking to queer artists and getting queer perspectives allows me to look into it through those glasses. In that way it becomes a queer folktale piece.”
One collaborator in particular is composer and violinist, Abèle Kildir. “Abèle is an amazing composer and her musical work in this play goes all over the map from some things that are very dreamy and floaty to hyper pop. I like to fuck around with expectations, so we’re in this old plot, but with Kildir’s music, it becomes like you’re in a club. Sometimes it’s metal. The music really brings that quality to the piece, by playing with what we expect to hear and layering things together.”
Maddix notes that there were many other collaborators who contributed. “There were collaborators that work in dance and performance and those layers were added through thinking about what and how to put a show together. I was really influenced by their perspective and way of creating. One important aspect of folktales is that there is no text. I work with images. I think it’s close to dance that way because oftentimes dance doesn’t have a fixed choreography. Performers just know what image they’re creating, the emotion or quality. So we were able to speak the same language.”
Well, with promises of queerness, fairies, flying islands, grandmothers, gambling, trans-species, and other dream-like features, this night of Acadian storytelling is sure to be spicy.
Conte Bright Comme Un Diamond will be performed on Feburary 17, 18, and 20 in Chiac and on February 22 in English at La Chapelle as part of the WinterWorks festival on February 25 to March 15. Tickets can be found HERE.
