Concert and Spoken Word Performance Featuring Bertrand Laurence and David Leo Sirois
Join us Sunday, September 20th, for an afternoon of soulful symphonies and melancholic melodies, featuring guitarist and singer-songwriter Bertrand Laurence, and poet, singer-songwriter, and actor David Leo Sirois.
Inspired by the Musée’s mission to celebrate the arts and Francophone heritage of Maine, Laurence and Sirois unite to present a special collaborative performance of music and French poetry. Sirois will eloquently recite his original Francophile poetry to the syncopated rhythms of Laurence’s strings, creating not only a heightened, dramatic atmosphere and improvisational feel, but also an homage to classical French song (chanson) and mélodie.
Such a structurally rhythmic reading of text accompanied with playful instrumentation seeks to mirror the natural inflections of the French language, all the while imbuing greater meaning into Sirois’s wordings.
Echoing the Musée’s emphasis on close-looking and a cherishing of subtlety, Laurence and Sirois encourage audiences to listen closely and appreciate deeply the nuance of intonation. The artists inspire a heightened sensitivity that extends beyond music and its periphery of spoken word, and into the everyday speech we share with others.
Printed copies of the artists’ lyrical works will be distributed to audience members to read and/or sing along.
Complimentary refreshments will be provided.
About the Artists
Bertrand Laurence is an international performer with a wide Festival, Concert and Club experience, having performed in venues across North America, Europe, and Asia. Laurence’s music entails a unique blending of traditional Blues/Swing/Ragtime/Folk as well as contemporary styles. His melodic stories and anecdotes derive from his observations and adventures in the U.S. as a Frenchman, social worker, mime, children’s theatre director, and musician.
From Rouen, the capital of Normandy in France’s northern region, Laurence recounts his early attraction to the rhythms and strings of acoustic blues music. Drawn by such tempos emanating from the U.S., Laurence departed France to study blues orally from concerts and radio shows, soon leading to his enrollment at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where he remained for a semester. While in Boston, Laurence became one of the first artists to perform at the original House of Blues near Harvard Square in Cambridge. Laurence was soon featured on NPR’s “Blues Stage,” whose host at the time – singer-songwriter, actress, and “Queen of R&B,” Ruth Brown – commented, “The man sure has his way with the boogie!”
Laurence traveled throughout the American South, recognizing and celebrating the inseparability of the French language with blues-based American music (e.g., Zydeco, Swing, Jazz, Soul, Rock’ n’ Roll). There, he could be found performing regularly in New Orleans, particularly at the Lafayette International Festival. Laurence has performed at various other festivals, including The Boston Blues Festival, Boston Folk Festival, Montreal Jazz, NYC International Busker’s Fair, and the Jazz au Mercure festival in Toulouse, France.
Laurence has led workshops and lectures on creativity and performance, and adopts a body-centered pedagogy in his music-making, enriched with mindful breath-works, centering meditation, and stress-reduction. He has taught “Guitar & Voice” nation-wide virtually via Zoom, and has designed a new workshop, “Finding your Voice,” coaching introspection (inner voice) and expression (written and vocal) amongst his trainees to connect and release authentic artistic form.
Learn more about Bertrand Laurence and his work by visiting his websites below:
David Leo Sirois is a Canadian-American poet and well-published author, whose works have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, gazettes and anthologies across a myriad of languages in 20 countries. Places where his work has appeared include, but are not limited to, The Bombay Review, Paris Lit Up, The Poetry Village, The Sunday Tribune Online, Ariel’s Dream, The Opiate, Silo, Those That This, THE BASTILLE, Belleville Park Pages, The Bioptic Review, and Terre à Ciel. His work has also appeared in The Keystone Anthology, the anthologies Vignettes & Postcards from Paris, and Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations.
Though a native and current resident of Edmundston, New Brunswick, Sirois lived in Paris for a number of years where he wrote and performed for an array of audiences. There, he was very active in the anglophone spoken word community, and hosted his own weekly open mic (Open Secret) as well as singer-songwriter showcases. When the literary journal, 21 Magazine, started at Charles University in Prague was in its infancy, Sirois was invited to submit to the magazine by an attendee at one of Open Secret’s first nights held in Paris’s Montmartre.
Sirois also acted in several independent films, a TV pilot, as well as a play, and co-wrote a play with his former partner, Iana Sophia, entitled How Not to Write a Play. It was chosen by the Montmartre Dionysia theatre festival, and put on stage in several Paris venues. Two of his poems were selected for usage in films, one as the soundtrack to the short film Bruno, directed by Matilda Thomas, after winning a contest by the Belleville Park Pages. Another poem, Silver Shiver, became a still-frame used to promote the film Coldhearts: A Poetical, written & directed in Paris by Bruce Edward Sherfield & Rufo Quintavalle.
Sirois presently hosts Spoken World Online, an international open mic that began when SpokenWord Paris faced the closure of performance venues, and the time of self-isolation arising from the Covid-19 pandemic. Sirois was a weekly attendee of SpokenWord Paris from 2012 until his return to Edmundston in 2017. Sirois recently submitted two manuscripts for publication; a full-length collection titled The Flavor of Water, as well as a comedic chapbook of poems to pigeons and plants, called Humbledoves.
Admission is free and/or by donation.
Your donation helps support the arts within Northern Maine, and contributes to the Musée’s mission of restoring and caring for a nationally significant heritage site, ensuring the longevity of its exceptional collection, the execution of its brilliant exhibitions, and the development of educational and community programs that aim to foster and safeguard Acadian and wider Francophone culture of the Saint John Valley.