photograph by Philippe Ollivier

You have never heard of Maryvonne Le Flem, who lived, loved, sewed shirts, raised children, blew up rocks with gunpowder, harvested seaweed, in the 19th century in a small village on the Northern coast of Brittany. And yet before the show is over you will root for her, rejoice in her indomitable spirit and share her pains. You will feel as if you had met her, thanks to singer Marthe Vassallo’s warm voice and passionate storytelling, based on her research through a rare treasure trove of documents.

Maryvonne would be a forgotten name in a registry were it not for her encounter with Breton writer Anatole Le Braz and musician Maurice Duhamel: the former noted down page after page about her, her songs and her stories, published some of them in his best-selling La Légende de la Mort, and gradually became a true friend of hers; the latter published over 60 of her tunes in his vast collection of traditional Breton music. It took Marthe Vassallo’s curiosity, one century later, to find that all this corpus, as well as a portrait she had found, depicted the same person – and a fiercely interesting person at that.

‘Marivon Vraz’ (Tall Maryvonne, her Breton nickname) never knew how to read and lived the thankless life of the poor, yet what is striking about her is her love of expression – singing, talking, telling and hearing stories – and her strength of body and mind. Life may deal blows and humiliations, she always finds a way to stand tall and optimistic. Her conversations with Anatole Le Braz are an autobiography; her songs tell of proud women, divine justice, true love and well-earned riches. As Marthe Vassallo reads from the archives, sings or tells the story of her life, Maryvonne regains more than some existence: shining through are her personality and agency, the very things that people like her were so often denied.

photograph by Philippe Ollivier

Marthe Vassallo first researched Maryvonne Le Flem as part of her project on Maurice Duhamel, Les Chants du Livre Bleu. ‘She was Duhamel’s most prolific singer, so I went looking specifically for her in the registers; later on, when I looked into Le Braz’s notebooks – initially still in search of info about Duhamel – , I knew enough to recognize her under the three different names that Le Braz uses for her. We usually know so little about the people behind the songs, and here I found myself with dozens of pages of full-color testimony to match 60 tunes! I instantly knew I was going to do something about her, and that it would have to be an artistic project, not just a research. She was truly leaping out of the pages, it would have made no sense not to share this emotion. I do my best to remain as accurate as I can, but I am a singer and a storyteller, and so was she. By sharing her life and interpreting the traces of her songs with my bare voice – in a show that originally took place outdoors in walking performances – I want to keep closest to the only powers she had: her voice, her imagination, her energy. I don’t shy away from the gaps in the story – the things I’ll never know, or the odd shadows in her own accounts –, yet audience members will tell me ‘‘it felt as if she was among us’’. That’s a fantastic reward.’

One of the original performances, on the island where Maryvonne Le Flem used to work – photograph by Philippe Ollivier

A Fur ha Foll / Le Logelloù production, in association with the Festival de Cornouaille and Petit Festival de Musique en Trégor with the support of the Région Bretagne and the Département des Côtes d’Armor.

Many thanks to the CRBC-UBO for access to Anatole Le Braz’s notebooks, and to Roy and Susan Eales for their proofreading.