Interview by William Chan
The 34th Macao Arts Festival will stage on May 31 and June 1 “The Fury of My Thoughts”, a play that explores the world and words of Nelly Arcan, a female novelist who published a novel based on her experience in the sex industry.
The play’s director and adaptor Marie Brassard discussed the work in a recent online interview with the Post.
Brassard is a Canadian actress, author and director who initially became known internationally as an artistic associate to Canadian stage and film director Robert Lepage, with whom she co-authored numerous plays. In 2001, Brassard staged her first solo production and soon founded Infrarouge, her own company, becoming known for dreamlike shows with a merging of creative expression that became her trademark.
The play features six actresses and a dancer from Infrarouge exploring Canadian novelist Nelly Arcan’s world and words about how women were imprisoned by an image of perfection, tortured by their gender. The Chinese translation of the title is (都市女子心靈圖鑑), meaning “The Portraits of an Urban Woman’s Inner Mind”.
Brassard noted that the English title refers to a sentence Nelly Arcan wrote in her book “Whore”, expressing the anger she felt due to pressure to be perfect in her work and personal life. “This ‘fury’ or anger is a sentiment many women experience in silence throughout their lives. Those feelings of inequality, injustice and of ‘never being enough’ are generated mainly by women’s body images we see everywhere in the media and social networks,” she said, adding that women often feel they don’t have the right to age naturally, which is unjust,” she said.
Brassard described Nelly Arcan as a “plural woman” who was a writer, artist, and engaged in graduate studies in Literature before briefly working as an escort. She said Nelly Arcan’s dark, difficult stories are largely fictional. “Our play comprises excerpts from several books. Each part, or ‘room’ relates to one of her obsessions. My intention is to showcase her brilliant writing. Her thoughts about women’s condition are echoing in many of us and are eye-openers for women and men,” she noted.
On stage, rooms expose women struggling with traumas, from dejected existences to hypersensitivities constrained by idealised beauty concepts. Brassard said that the play doesn’t praise or condemn prostitution, but addresses problems with unrealistic media portrayals of women’s bodies as unattainable goals. “The scenography, trapping women in glass rooms, conveys loneliness. Each room depicts a theme Nelly Arcan wrote about like family, religion, death, gender confusion,” she noted.
Asked if the play could change perceptions of sex work, Brassard said she has no intention of debunking conceptions, noting Nelly Arcan’s suicide in 2009, aged 34, wasn’t about exchanging sex for money, but “the pressures women feel to be perfect, and to fit impossible idealised beauty standards.” Brassard believes Nelly Arcan was, like most women, terrified of ageing and losing beauty.
Brassard underlined such body standards praising physical perfection still prevail through media emphasising beauty’s illusory power, creating damage and concerns among women through unbalanced requirements and the despotism that it implies. “‘The Fury of My Thoughts’ is a powerful evocation of these societal pressures through this extraordinary writer’s eyes,” she said.
“The Fury of My Thoughts” will be performed on May 31 and June 1 at 8 p.m. at the Macau Cultural Centre (CCM) Grand Auditorium at 8 p.m. The play is performed in French, with subtitles in Chinese and English available. Tickets are priced at 380, 280, 200 and 120 patacas, depending on the seats. For more information, visit: www.icm.gov.mo/fam/34/en/content/4268
Photos: Michael Slobodian
