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PART II

My Hockey Sweater story.

 

My love of hockey or more specifically of the Montreal Canadiens began before I knew what hockey was or if it was at all.

 

I was six or seven living in Hajdunánás Hungary. It was a small town of a few of thousand. Not everybody had electricity and indoor plumbing was rare. But it did have a soccer team and my father was its manager. I loved soccer and played it whenever I could. I even sneaked out of Jewish school to play with my cousins and friends. My favourite team was Budapest Honvéd (The Budapest Home Defense). It was the army team. Every player was a colonel or a captain, depending on how well they played. They were usually the best team in the league year after year. Their uniform had bands across the chest very much like the Montreal Canadiens.

 

My aunt Margo had emigrated to Montreal after the war and occasionally sent home clothes that she collected from the people she worked for. Included in one care package was a woolen Montreal Canadiens jersey. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It looked very much like my favourite soccer team’s uniform. I wore that itchy winter wooly sweater even on the hottest days to play soccer.

 

After we escaped in 1956 and came to Canada and spent the first bitter winter almost indoors, I became acquainted with hockey, with The Habs of Maurice “The Rocket” Richard and their annual Stanley Cup wins. Winning was the only way to play hockey in Montreal. We became spoiled and this continued in the seventies. By that time, I was getting involved in the arts but still was a Habs fanatic. The year they lost only ten games out of eighty, I went regularly to a tavern and wrote a poem for every game. The title of each poem was the score of the game. These poems were the early inspiration for part II (second period) of this piece. Contact improvisation was the perfect dance form for this piece. The piece involved contact, movement that could be graceful, violent, dynamic, and athletic. I also liked the idea that most of the dancers were female.

 

I decided to structure the piece along the lines of a game. It started in the dressing room, with the metamorphosis of the dancers into hockey players. It had a coach’s pep talk, a warm up, the national anthem (which at the time in Montreal was a controversial and political act), and the game. The movement was “imitative” to some degree but the dancers transformed it into something that celebrated those moves and made them into dance. I had Michel, as the referee, recite some of the poems/texts at each whistle. The texts dealt with hockey and Quebec politics. It was the time of the Referendum about the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada and I certainly had that in mind. The Face-Off/Mise au jeu in this section was a metaphor for the debate. We also performed it in English and French on alternative nights.

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Part 2

 

PART III

How Can a da Separate

This section is very much of the time. 1980 was the year of The Referendum. Quebec people were going to vote whether to separate or not from the rest of Canada. In many ways Quebec was separate from the rest of Canada for a long time but this time it was coming to a vote. It was a passionate political time in a passionate political province.

 

Everybody had an opinion, everybody had a vested interest, everybody cared. And many were torn because they had family, friends on both sides of the debate. Especially us allophones. Allophones were those who were neither English or French, had roots somewhere else but had been uprooted or chosen to come here to what we thought was a peaceful country. And to a large degree this was true. Even though the extreme, scare mongers predicted violence no matter which way the vote went, this was basically an incredibly peaceful nation. The choice was decided not by bombs, though there was some over the years, but by the ballot box.

 

Most of the francophone poets were very vocally pro separation. The English language poets were vocal via their silence. They had withdrawn into their shells and abandoned any and all engagement. I think Tom Konyves, a fellow allophone, and I were the only ones who dealt with the issue. He did a videopoem entitled See/Saw.

 

This part of Face-Off/Mise au Jeu was my direct confrontation of the issue. As an allophone living and working mainly in an Anglophone environment, who understood most, spoke passable but could hardly read French, I felt insecure. On the other hand “something must be said …”(get quote), I was married to a French Canadian, I had a number of francophone friends who were sovereignists  (some of my best friends…). We didn’t discuss it much but it was in the air. So I decided to do a piece about it. But I didn’t want to repeat the clichés, or if I did use them, then it would be in a refreshing way. From my own experience, I knew issue wasn’t clear cut. Even though it was presented as a clear two opposing sides battle, we knew that there were a lot more entanglements than what we got indoctrinated by.

 

The performers were a mix of French, English, “ethnic” and allophones. I gave them a task. I asked them to complete the motto “I remember”. I wanted them to make a list beginning with “I remember”.

 

In Quebec, that phrase means a lot more than in most places in canada. It’s not only recalls personal memories but also as a call to remember for a whole culture. In Quebec this is a “charged” phrase. But I don’t think most people know what they are supposed to remember. Historians debated its origins and the reasons for using it.

 

The performers were aware of the charge this phrase carried but they were also free to use their own “I remember” and it could be in English or French or both.

 

I had an underlying arc of a narrative that I wove through the remembrances that was both political and personal. These were Voice  ? and Voice. And to some degree every performer has a story to tell.

 

There is no clear cut solution offered here. It’s the complexity of reality, a reality in which there is just an ongoing debate, threats, political posturing and genuine passion that is being reflected. It was 1980 and everything seemed important.

 

It seemed right for a poet to be engaged in it. It was about language, its importance, its fragility, its fear of being discarded, its being the master of the house. It’s also about being here at this time.

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