Theatre group lifts spirits of vulnerable people with poetry
Paris – Cooped up every day by the pandemic, 79-year-old Francoise is tired of looking at the tower blocks outside her window.
“There’s not much greenery,” she says.
Luckily, her “doctor” for the day has the right medicine.
Isabelle Jeanbrau, a member of the Paris-based Theatre de la Ville, leafs through a folder of poems and picks one by Anna de Noailles, The Offerings of
Nature. “To take you on a little trip,” says Jeanbrau.
The reading is punctuated by little expressions of joy from the patient. “She’s understood what I love,” coos Francoise, who asked not to give her full name.
They are sat in L’Espace Phare, a day centre run by a mental health association, and Jeanbrau is part of a pioneering project using arts as a salve for vulnerable members of society.
The poem unleashes Francoise’s memories and soon she is recalling everything from her childhood in Vichy to her years as a seamstress at Chanel.
Jeanbrau looks for something to remind Francoise of her working days. She settles on Baudelaire’s With Her Pearly, Undulating Dresses – and Francoise is captivated once more.
“It’s like she’s reading me,” she says, and adds, laughing: “If you could read these things to everyone, there wouldn’t be any more crazies out there.”
She is surprised that she has opened up so much to a stranger, but Jeanbrau is not. “Very often, poems are a key that opens a door,” Jeanbrau says.
The therapy works both ways: “At a time when artists feel totally muzzled, suddenly we have the feeling of being essential.”
The project began modestly with poetry readings over the phone for anyone needing a little uplift. Planned before the pandemic, it began just at the right moment in March 2020 and proved wildly successful, delivering some 15 000 “phone consultations” over the past year.
The team quickly realised many of the most vulnerable did not speak good French, and so began adding actors from different backgrounds, eventually operating in 23 languages. Many were left in tears and emotional relationships were forged.
From November, the company started visiting hospitals, day centres, shelters and schools, and now has more than 100 actors, dancers and musicians working on the project – even scientists giving talks.