Pop 89: Bastille Day, Denis, and the birth of Aunty Maddy
By Madonna Hamel
While for many of us July 14 marks Bastille Day, the national holiday of France and the 1789 storming of the Bastille, a pivotal event in the French Revolution, the day for me will always mark the birthday of my pal, ex-boyfriend and partner in art and music, Denis Belly.
We met at an East meets West performance festival where artists from Quebec City were invited to perform with artists from Vancouver. I was immediately delighted by his whimsical approach to cultural relations, referencing the winds of change by throwing piles of maple leaves he brought from Quebec City into the air in front of two big fans, and mixing them with leaves he'd collected in Stanley Park. Singing in a blend of Fringlish and nonsense poetry, his inimitable style, he cut through the rigid worry inherent in cultural identity politics that was beginning to pepper our world with its hyper-vigilant vocabulary.
"Humans are not inventions, they are souls. Blenders, cell phones, electric can openers, those are inventions.”
Not long after the performance came the referendum in Quebec, and while both Denis and I were sympathetic to the cause, we were also unwilling to let politics override our poetics.
Denis is not one to get precious or political when it comes to performance. East met with West thanks in great part to Denis. The rising tide of relentless identity politics did not flood the evening with rhetoric. Denis played the slide guitar. I sang about Amelia Earhart. By the end of the night our future was decided: we would become musical partners.
When I finally packed up my Chevy Cavalier and headed East to accept an invite to perform in another festival, I found myself becoming part of the Quebec performance family. I became a librarian and reviewer of performance magazines and books.
Reviewing performances was a challenge. I'm not a fan of postmodern deconstructionist critical theory. Art school was never about re-inventing myself. I was adamant that humans are not inventions, they are souls. We are souls, evolving, not things. Blenders, cell phones, electric can openers, those are inventions, I asserted.
And when a fellow artist in the graphic design department waxed on about the new tool on her computer that allowed her to "cut and paste," I lost it on her. Waving my hand in the air, I exclaimed: Oh yeah, I've got one of those tools too, it's called a hand!
Enthrallment with the digital world was taking over the art school. I wanted the flesh and blood and paint stain and mud of the workshop and the studio. I moved to Quebec City not knowing what I'd find, except that I wanted to make music, tell stories and collage.
Denis is one of my favourite collage artists. Like me, he uses whatever appears before him, grabbing at images from old encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, detritus from daily living, uplifting the mundane to the magical and delightful.
But perhaps the most life-saving gesture for me was when we formed a band. Though I was thankful to be part of a performance community, I was becoming less and less enamoured with the assumption that we were all supposed to live a life of resistance to anything that might seem, heaven forbid, normal.
As a woman I resisted notions of superficial beauty and gender compliance, but I hated even more the performance art world's tendency to expect that I should exploit my sexuality as a way of proving that I have power, whatever that power meant. The art scene was getting too bizarre and disturbing for my liking.
"The need to prove oneself as a boundary-pusher exists in all fields, and the arts are the worst, if you ask me."
I can tell you the exact moment when I gave up on the weird world of performance art that dictated a wholesale embrace of "rebellion," "resistance," "radical subversiveness" and self-exploitation, behaviours that struck me as a form of delayed adolescence, when what was really needed was the opposite: the creativity inherent in our childhood sense of curiosity and wonder. Which is something Denis and my fellow Quebec artists brought, literally, to the kitchen table, in abundance. Songs were written over chicken dinners and Denis' notoriously rich four-cheese pastas. I brought the lyrics, he brought the melodies. And Etienne, our drummer, brought the rhythm.
I can tell you the exact moment we, as a group, understood that we needed to form a band.
About five years earlier, a young woman was garnering attention on the performance scene by doing a guerrilla intervention piece outside one of our own performances. While I was paying tribute to the blues with a song about giving my soul to the rhythm instead of giving it to a man, she was busy shaving her legs until they bled. For this she was heavily applauded.
But the real turning point for me and my friends was the night five years later, when we stood as part of the audience and watched her jump up and down on a chair beneath a loosely closed box of nails. When the flaps of the box finally broke open, we, as a group of older artists and mostly musicians, decided we'd had enough. We stopped the show. And it may not surprise you to know that there were artists in the crowd who were actually angry at us for doing so. The need to prove oneself as a "risk-taker," a shocker, a boundary-pusher, as opposed to a person with zero boundaries, exists in all fields, and the arts are the worst, if you ask me.
Then and there we began the band Aunty Maddy, and we never stopped creating.
I still wish we'd done more recordings of the songs we wrote, but we have cassettes of some of them and all our rehearsals. My favourite songs, Nosa Senhora, Show me Cassiopeia, The Nun's Shoes, to name a few, deserve to be preserved for posterity. But meanwhile, they remain the product of a willingness to try new things, to collage the oddest bits of life bubbling up from the childhood wonder and whimsy I still think of when I think of my time with Denis, and the creativity we encouraged in each other, ultimately producing a revolution that stormed the bastilles of both the conventional and reactionary.