FEATURE INTERVIEW:
Christian Laveau comes full Cirque
3 AUG/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

TORONTO - Christian Laveau was born from a union of two worlds - so, in retrospect, it is only fitting he finds himself inhabiting multiple worlds today — even while he’s doing his level best to make all those worlds one.

His mother and father, while both of the Huron (or Wendat) nation, came from two very different worlds — his mother from the world of the trapper in English Ontario, his father from the world of the reservation in French Quebec where Laveau was raised. And even though the 37-year-old was raised in the French language, he was steeped not just in the culture of his people, but in its traditions as well.

Which is how he found himself centre stage, singing traditional songs in the ceremonies commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec a few years back. After his performance, he was approached by no less a personage than Robert Lepage, who explained he was in the process of creating a new work for the visionaries at Cirque du Soleil — a work that would trace the very evolution of mankind from the beginning of time.

“He said to me: ‘I see you inside my show,’ ” Laveau recalls. Honoured at the invitation, Laveau was more than a little reluctant to tackle such a complex project. “I was afraid to be not ready,” he says, striving for fluency in an English language that still sits a little uncomfortably on his tongue. But Lepage persevered.

“He said: ‘What we need is the spirit,’ ” Laveau recalls. Lepage must have said it in a rather compelling fashion, for Laveau ended up signing a contract to perform — in his native Wendat tongue — as the main singer in the show Lepage was creating. That show is called TOTEM and it is slated to open an already-extended run under Cirque’s trademark Grand Chapiteau in the Portlands on Cherry Street next week.

A year and a half into his contract, Laveau says it has proved to be a good choice. “They have never tried to change me,” he reports, as he recalls Lepage telling him: “It is you who is going to teach us.”

For Laveau, who in addition to his music also devotes his considerable energies to an acting and television career (he’s host and co-producer of APTN’s cultural magazine, Chic Choc), the principal thrill has been performing in the language of his ancestors — a language he is working hard to reclaim, not just for his personal use, but for his people as well. “When the missionaries arrived, they obliged us to speak in French,” he explains. “For 80 years, my language was sleeping.”

And while he strives every day to awaken his own knowledge of that language, he seems to harbour no rancour at how close his people came to losing it. “I cannot change the history,” he says. “I have to see the present and the future — but I have the memory of my ancestors.” And that memory is what he strives to pass on, not just in his work with TOTEM, but in his own music and in his television show. “Our children are our future,” he says. “I help the children now to always be proud of the culture — to be proud to be native Canadian.”

And that pride and passion for his culture is not confined to preserving its music and its language either. He’s also passionate about the husbanding of a knowledge of native plants and has worked for several years in the First Nations Garden at the Montreal Botanical Garden, learning and passing on centuries of hard-won wisdom in the only way he feels it should be passed on. “It’s the elders who teach it to us,” he explains “And they don’t want us to write the book. It all comes from the plant and you have to take what you need.”

It is, finally, all part and parcel of a personal philosophy that certainly has its seeds in the Wendat culture but has grown until it seems to embrace all of humanity. “Wendat means ‘human’ — it’s very simple.” he says. “All these things that I do, it’s just sharing.”

And he’ll continue to travel and to share. “If (people) don’t understand what I’m saying, I know they feel it in their hearts,” he says. “Of course, I miss my home, but I’m very happy here and the experiences I have here I will take back to the young people.”