Duras wields words like an enchantress, and to hear her reflect aloud is to access literature directly. She moves forward, sentences before her like scouts, penetrating mysteries, dispelling darkness, revealing the contours of emotional geography. Her speech, determined and hesitant, reveals a thought in motion, and one wonders if the words spoken surprise her, and from which mysterious depths of her being they emanate…

In Savannah Bay, c'est toi, it is the theater as an enigma that she grapples with. We witness the explorations of the three women before a text that comes to life through the unmatched force of theater. On the softly lit stage, Madeleine Renaud and Bulle Ogier find and invent their truths in front of an imperious Duras who grants them no certainties.

"Only today can I tell Savannah Bay. The text was nothing before the actresses made it their own, brought it to life."

So, sometimes, Duras is just that. The text revealed by its arrival in beings. The text digested, experienced, walked, felt, with no truth other than this total presence in the body. Like passion. Unfathomable, almost unspeakable, and something the writer will grapple with her entire life. Circling around it and showing it to us through absence. Duras, the enchantress.
 

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director