Normandy’s "A Bon Port" harbours culture in Dieppe

by Rosslyn Hyams

Article published on the 2009-11-16 Latest update 2009-11-16 17:38 TU

Dieppe port
(Photo: R Hyams)

Dieppe is an unusual tourist or culture-vulture destination. But in November 2009, the Festival d'Automne en Normandie, the Normandy Autumn Festival, provided a weekend of entertainment as part of its five-week-long jamboree in the north-western port town.

It was called A Bon Port and it scheduled a wide-range of music, dance and theatre events from Saturday afternoon till Monday. The whole festival, which takes place in the north-west of France each year, is as broad as it is wide in time, place and diversity of artistic discipline.

Festival director Benoit André says that "even though the festival is quite big, we try to concentrate part of the programme on some artists, for example Philip Glass”. André says that this is the most expansive cycle of Glass’s work ever-presented.

Roland Shön is a Dieppe-based puppeteer and painter who was commissioned to bring curious locals and visitors to a somewhat dilapidated church in the old fishermen's quarter, Pollet. This part of the harbour is not as spruced up as the other side of the harbour, with its sea-food restaurants which you can see through the tall, thin masts.

Shön tells a story he's half made-up about a traditional form of entertainment dating back to the 15th century, that has disappeared. The audience tells its stories based on the pictures or designs or colours that they watch on painted, canvas scroll as it unfurls.

C Blondeau and B André
(Photo: R Hyams)

Catherine Blondeau is the festival's Artistic Director for the weekend organised in Dieppe. She said that A Bon Port, which means "arrived safely", was conceived to help people to get to know Dieppe better as well as to enjoy new and old artists.

“The idea was to invite artists to work on site-specific projects and work with the identity of the territory of the city," she says, "and to mix popular art and more savvy art, in a very contemporary way and to mix indoors and outdoors and to concentrate a lot of in three days.”

I dashed from the Eglise de Notre-Dame-des-Grèves in the Quartier Pollet to the next performance - by Jorg Muller, formerly of the Cirque Plume, over at the Dieppe Scène Nationale.

Muller performed a piece called Mobiles. It was a brilliant 25-minute-long act. He juggled with his whole body, moving in and out, and round about a series of metal tubes or chimes. The tubes danced together, came close and then avoided each other, chased each other and Muller himself, or so it appeared. It certainly made the children laugh. Choreographer, dancer, athlete, juggler and clown - in a word an artist.

(Photo: R Hyams)

At about 8.30 on Saturday night, a crowd of 200 people gathered under a tarpaulin tent in the grounds of the lovely Château de Miromesnil just inland from Dieppe. They were aged from about six to about 76, wearing sensible, waterproof footwear, and were waiting to be led around the muddy grounds looking for a centaur.

In fact, we found the Centaure Theatre from Marseille who defy gravity and equine temperament to do clever things on horseback.

Their production, Flux, took us from one lawn to another, wearing headphones, and listening to multi-lingual prose, hoof thuds and snorting, which relate to the love story projected on three black and white short films shot in three ports. People stood still and watched - captivated - all 200 of us.

Flux was one example of Catherine Blondeau's determination to link artistic and imaginative discovery with the exploration of a beautiful local place.

Some of the sites are less obviously beautiful or charming, but the effect of music and light can make a huge difference. At the fish market in Dieppe, for example, a light show played on the concrete in the early evening, and on the Quai Dusquene, which looks onto the fish market, a crowd stood listening for 50 minutes to foghorns playing the bass accompaniment to haunting music of the seas and coasts of north-west France, and Europe.

The show was called the Le Chant des Sirènes and was performed by the French stage company, Mécanique Vivante on four boats in the harbour.

It was raining, but the beauty of the lit-up boats on the water, the bouquets of foghorns and the strangeness of the music in the cold night air kept the audience there until the Sirènes evaporated into the damp night air.

Benoit André, the festival director, commented that after the years of preparation for each festival, he awaits the audience’s response with anticipation. “The main idea of the programme is to find ways to touch all the public," he says, "when you build a programme you don’t know if the public will accept it and of course the response of the public is the most important thing for me during the festival.”

The Festival d'Automne en Normandie is on in and around Rouen, Evreux, Le Havre and Dieppe as well as other places in the region until the 26 November. There is a closing night concert by singer/actress Ute Lemper of Cabaret.