Sad news

[Louise Forsyth]

Dear colleagues,

 

Québec playwright, sculptor and novelist Jovette Marchessault died on Dec.
31. She was 74 (1938-2012). She was recognized as Honorary Member of
CATR/ARTC in 1999 for her outstanding, original and beautiful body of
dramatic works. She was, in fact, the first Québec woman to create a major
dramatic feminist oeuvre: Vaches de Nuit (Night Cows), La Saga des poules
mouillées, La Terre est trop courte, Violette Leduc (The Edge of Earth is
Too Near, Violette Leduc), Anaïs dans la queue de la comète, Le Voyage
magnifique d’Emily Carr (Governor General Prize), Le Lion de Bangor, Madame
Blavatsky, spirite, Le Pérégrin chérubinique. Often interpreted by Pol
Pelletier, she was – visionary poet, feminist, lesbian – the leading pioneer
playwright in the emergence in Québec of an impressive cohort of feminist
playwrights in the 1980s and continuing until today.

 

Her pride in her First Nations heritage, her profound resonance with the
natural world and her close touch with those who had been marginalized for
one reason or other by society gave her an artist’s voice of major
significance and resonance. Her integrity in remaining true to her own path
has been amazing through the decades. She was an intensely practical person
closely attached to the material world and, at the same time, a visionary
beacon whose death leaves an aching void.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20130102/f98f3477/attachment.html>