A bumble bee, memories of her first visit to India, a bird perched on the roof... glimpses of everyday life intrigue and excite French performance poet, Claire Le Michel. The Parisian poet, who draws her inspiration from Nature, was here in the city for a reading, organised by the Prakriti Foundation. During the session, Claire bridged performance and poetry: at one point she even jumped over a skipping rope as she read out verse. “Poetry, for me, is not about reading alone. But, also to share. It is something intimate. I love bringing intimacy on stage,” says the artiste.
The rope is a metaphor for time, says Michel. “Like the centre of time, it is eternal. When I was a little girl, it was all joyful. As you grow up, you tend to feel lost like a drop of water in the ocean. It signifies this passage of time.”
A French boxer, practising Yoga and martial arts, Michel is also a dancer and a theatre artiste. Dance, poetry and theatre intertwine in curious ways in her work.
Not just word play
There is a meditative calm in the way she talks, and she utters every word with a great amount of thought and sensitivity. “Writing is prayer for me, and poetry spiritual. I can speak only for myself. It is spiritual when I write. It is not just word play.”
There is a deliberate slowing down in her poetic process too. For instance, the poem A Strange Encounter , where she writes about a bumble bee that stings her, and dies losing its sting to protect itself, teaches her how precious life is. It could be the Yoga and her attraction to Zen philosophy. “I discovered Yoga after I visited Kerala. It is not just for the body, but also the soul and the mind. There is something deep about it.”
Michel says she thinks through writing. And, more often, she attempts to understand events around her through the act of poetry. Take for instance, her poem, Colours of June , which she wrote in a state of anger and powerlessness. The poem was an outcome of her reaction to the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “ It is called Colours of June because the rainbow symbolises homosexuality. I connected my poem to Louis Armstrong’s song called ‘What A Wonderful World’. Writing is my way of dealing with the reality around me.” A Parisian by birth, her heart has always belonged to the suburbs. And that’s why, 10 years ago, she moved to the countryside in the West of France, and made her home in a village called Bordeaux. “As a writer, I connect with Nature. I need to see it every day. That’s more important to me than anything else.”
The poetry of performance
French is a complicated language. She prefers to write in English, which she says is more pragmatic. “We have a great theatre writer in French called Samuel Beckett, who did incredible things with French. He was Irish by birth. When you do not know a language from birth, you can play with it more.”
She believes that dance, poetry and music is as essential to her as air. The two years spent in college, right after school, just studying English literature, was suffocating, recalls Michel. She says it was similar to living without oxygen. “As a child, I used to practise the arts like dance and music. But now, everything has stopped. I was studying to be a teacher. But, it was not my way to be. Because I could not live without breathing.” She got back to what gave her joy: theatre, dance and poetry.
Poetry is music. Singing is conversing. Dancing is thinking. They are seamless for Claire, who doesn’t believe in boundaries. It is all about how you play with the energy around you. “I write not when I know something, but when I am looking for something. I think through talking, writing or dancing. And, dancing is also a way of writing with space.” One cannot compartmentalise art or life, feels Michel. “Life is like a big river. How can you compartmentalise it? For me, performance is also a kind of poetry. I collect interviews with people and intimate accounts of their feelings. I like to fill my poems with lots of voices. Performance is not only about understanding, but it is also a feeling. We stress so much on thinking that we forget about intuition and heart.”
