Daniel Danis Le Langue-à-Langue des chiens de roche
direction Michel Didym

Presentation :


On an island, while strange yapping fills the sky in the middle of the night, while the islanders beat and abandon their dogs in broad daylight, while others go to rage parties on the shore to chant: "I've got the taste of paradise! I've got the taste of good sex!", a love story in relay is about to begin in the wind and the fog.
Two native women friends, Déesse, the drunken earth, Joëlle, rockfill, and her young mixed-race daughter, Djoukie, live thanks to their gas station, the Gaz-O-Tee-Pee. Léo, a father in his sixties, and his two younger sons, Charles and Niki, look after their two hundred and forty-six dogs. Coyote, who thinks he's a demigod, finds a job for his friend, Simon, an ex-soldier. Murielle, a refugee from the city, tries clumsily to die.
Who will listen to Niki and Djoukie's cry of "help" for love, while Coyote makes love with Déesse, while Simon breaks Joëlle's heart, while Charles invites Murielle back to life and while Léo calls to his Èva in heaven?





More about Le Langue-à-Langue des chiens de roche
by Daniel Danis

What is this language that I speak in Quebec, and is it different from the one written down in my plays - I must say immediately and without putting the question mark that body and language are one, they have the same name and reveal the same nature, I may add, writing that leads somewhere is only the extension of an experience lived, dreamed, imagined. I plunge my Quebec-body into the ground, to take root, to wonder about the language, my mouth full of earth and lakes, am I an ideal of inhabited worlds far from the cities, are theatrical languages now divided into two groups, towns and countries, am I a glossary of a few ancient words and a thousand Anglicisms interwoven into a tasty, juicy French kiss, am I a dog who calls to other dogs to bark in a rock language so that the order of the "word-ish" can grow to become a fusional tree, to live heaven and earth, while a part of the world breathes in an endless movement of worry, is my rambling writing seeking autochtony of our anchorages, the theatre takes me by the belly, virulently, TO SAY WHAT TO WHOM, in this place where an image of public understanding is created, the last entrenchment of any possible "dream-ish", so where is the departure point of the fable to be told, and in which language. In a dreamed past, I discovered that the "word-ish" language was lodged in the left foot, in a darkened room, a luminous left foot enters, a left foot beneath the coral waters, a left foot of black blood-veined stone walks in a field to be gleaned, mine, the left covered with greenish mildew decomposes, putrefies, liquefies into a red ink blackened by oxygen. The speak-theatre, if it exists, starts from the ground up to the mouth of my mental hand, is written on fable paper up to the memory of the actors who, through their lips let out from their throat clouds of humidity that are so dense that such a concentration of successive waves of the said elements will give rise to violent turbulence leading to an archaic tempest, invisible for some, felt by others. I don't write, the theatre of my language is a humid act, which tries to build miniature forgotten oceans, to spread its nets there and to bring up to the surface swarming, scaly words with nourishing bodies, in order to try to understand better the rages and the cries of help for love of the community of my landowners.

Daniel Danis





A word from the director

When you come to hear Le Langue-à-Langue des chiens de roche, let's try not to rebel against death but against what kills.
Young people, seeking a patch of earth where they can re-create themselves, establish themselves, try to awaken their consciences far away from that part of fear which arouses suspicion and contempt between peoples, that fear which opposes valleys and their standard-bearing towns, which opposes districts between each other and which even within a street creates hatred and the definitive incomprehension which also means that within families, the father worries and becomes strained, while the son is furious.
Those who desperately seek to find again or to at last encounter this part of themselves that was lost, which surely exists in the other, in the loved one who alone can readjust the inner clock unbalanced by absence, those behind or ahead in love will hear a "help" that is simple and clear in its natural humanity, where, on a fictional island on the Saint-Laurent river, this tale of dogs inevitably moves forward.

Michel Didym







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