Be careful, the following remarks could shock you. Let’s say that they clash, but that they have the merit of being felt. After all, it’s her experience, she has a lot to tell and, above all, she wants to be heard.
“I wanted to put these two backgrounds face to face, because I’m better off in a strip club than in a yoga school”, declares without hesitation the one who publishes these days Yogi Stripper, an autobiographical story at Éditions La Wick (La Courte Échelle), in the Flammèches collection.
If she’s not putting gloves on in her text, she’s outright throwing them on in person. “A strip club is bright, there’s room for all kinds of people, and no one lectures you.” While in a yoga school, continues the author, met a few days ago, we judge a lot: what I eat, what I consume, what time I get up. »
“In a yoga studio, intercourse is sweet. There is a lot of good faith. But it’s not because it’s in good faith that it’s okay to do it”, continues the one who has had enough of “moral superiority”, further served by a “false guru” disguised as a dolphin , we will understand. Dauphin out of his life since, we reassure you.
Besides, if she no longer teaches yoga (“I’m going to do it, to take care of my body”), she has not closed the door to dance for all that. “I have the opportunity to do something else (including a book and also a construction job!), but the door is not closed, because I really like it! »
Why, exactly? As far as she can remember, Marie-Claude Renaud, a veritable chatterbox, has always loved to dance. To forget, we understand. “Music is mesmerizing. There is something mesmerizing. When you dance, the pain disappears. There is not much that takes up all the space like that, that plugs all the holes. Sexuality? Drugs ? God takes over. No, there’s not much that silences a tormented head…”
Because yes, Marie-Claude Renaud, who studied (unfinished) in plastic arts, humanities, nursing, theater and screenwriting, has always had a “tormented head”. “It doesn’t stop…”
And why would you want to dance naked, exactly? “I didn’t know how to be recognized [otherwise],” she replies, pointing to the current culture and all the hypocrisy that surrounds it. “It’s that culture that made me think I had to take my clothes off,” she adds, citing Hollywood and the movies of the 80s and 90s (hello, Pretty Woman).
She began her career in the late twenties, in strip bars in New Brunswick before landing in Kingston, to end up in the most chic clubs in Montreal. It is paradoxically in these same bars that Marie-Claude Renaud also understood that there was not only appearance in life.
And no, not because she was doing the most extras. Completely the opposite. “But because of my personality,” said one who saw her “art” as also “therapeutic healing.” “You look, you listen, you welcome. You don’t find that often,” she argues.
When asked if she is not afraid here of trivializing the world of dancers and prostitution, she answers: “Yes, we live in a culture that trivializes. But me, I tell my life: not to promote it, on the contrary! »
It must be said that no, all is not exactly rosy in his story. Marie-Claude Renaud also recounts her troubled relationship with food (she suffered from bulimia), not to mention drugs. She also spent many months in detox, which earned us yet another rant. “It’s a perspective you don’t hear often,” she said. But I have things to say. Including: “Abstinence, in my opinion, is not sobriety. It’s not balance. Once addicted, always addicted? “I don’t really believe in that,” she snaps. Maybe in some cases? “Maybe not,” she adds. Me, I take a joint puff every other day, I’m able to eat a dessert and I’m able to have a drink without getting drunk. »
Note the irony: “I complain about people who preach morality and I end up moralizing,” laughs Marie-Claude Renaud. Most of all, I want people to be entertained. They don’t have to be educated…” A little rushed, maybe?
