Quietly

06/11/2021

Check out this interview about Quietly from Halifax Presents

Launched at the 2021 Stages Theatre Festival earlier this month, Halifax filmmaker Margaret Muriel makes her digital theatrical piece Quietly available for new audiences through June 20. In this Q&A with the filmmaker, we find out more about her solo creation conceived in the midst of the lockdown.....

05/22/2021

*********************ANNOUNCMENT!****************************

***Video CW: BRIGHT FLASHING LIGHT***

QUIETLY WILL BE LAUNCHED ON JUNE 8th at 7pm as a part of Eastern Front Theatre's Stages Festival. Thank you EFT!
There will be a zoom talk-back following the viewing.

After the quick (virtual) party at Stages, Quietly will be available for viewing through Eventbrite- from June 9th - 20th

Tickets are on sale now!

Festival Passes for Stages will get you into Quietly's Launch AND a number of other super rad virtual performances (including Sam Horak's So Not Punk Rock- a workshop reading I have the honour of directing.) The festival runs from June 4th-11th. Find our more at https://www.easternfronttheatre.com

Quietly will run from June 9th- 20th on Eventbrite.
Ticket holders will receive an email (after June 1st) outlining how they can view Quietly. There will be two other talk-backs scheduled, open to all ticket holders, dates TBA. A special chat will be scheduled for interested Instagram folks who have been following along with the process.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/x/quietly-tickets-145090632989

(A specific rate is available for a group of people who would like to watch Quietly 'together' and have a talk-back without other audience members. Please contact me for details: [email protected])

05/21/2021

These days I only feel safe in the bath
and even then I’m scared I’ll drown.

It hit me hard even before I knew it was personal.
It hit me.
Because if you know, you know.

You know the red flags
they come in the form of malicious questions
they fly across the room
they are directed.
And their most common commonality?
They are, must be, seen clearly and then ignored/
encouraged, exalted.

And you feel, I feel
responsible somehow
not to be confused with
At Fault
because I knew
we knew, didn’t we?
But we were divorced from impact-
we signed the papers and filed them away under Regrets.
We do, after all,
discard the impacted with remarkable detachment.

A survival instinct can be misshapen don’t you know that?
Don’t you know everything in this world
is tired of shape?
Even my Uterus is trying to expand beyond it’s horizons.

It hit me and I slumped into the bath
lighting candles
blocking out the day

the salted water drew it out of me
Or the moment
Or the great pause
Or the silence.

And I guess I was used to it coming back
and I was very still
and the faucet at my feet was dripping
and I thought about the accumulation of water
and I knew that drips would become drops
and I knew that the drops would add up
and I knew that I would be submerged someday
and I knew I might drown

like she did.

And I feel responsible-
not to be confused with at fault.
Because I knew.
We knew, didn’t we.



Margaret Muriel Legere

*image description*
A body of water meets the sky. At the horizon line, across the image, is a thin, silhouetted peninsula. At the far left of the land stands a lighthouse. The entire image is bathed in a dark, pink hue.

12/12/2020

You’ll be fine
He said
You’re a superhero.

I sat at the Coastal Inn. I remember thinking that the room was nice. I answered a call. I watched Friends. I drank a beer. I answered another call. I thought about the fire in the field at the cottage and how we’d put it out with jugs of water and blankets drenched in the harbour. I watched Friends. There must have been a marathon on that night. I did some reading and figured out how to turn up the heat in the room. I was crying when I arrived so I didn’t want to go back out and ask the front desk person. She’d done her diligence regarding empathy for the night.

I imagined myself onstage. I wrote this. A version of this.

I fell asleep and when I awoke I went to the Waterfowl Park. You would think I’d want to get out of there asap but I loved that town before I loved him and I wanted to leave with some of what I had found there, even if I had to go with a broken heart too.

There was snow on the ground.
I walked icy paths covered in yellow leaves
autumn waning.
I took some pictures.
I wrote a poem in my mind and then forgot it.

I drove home
which is to say
I drove two hours and seven minutes to The Bus Stop Theatre
and watched a one-person show.

Resilience
She said later over beers.

12/04/2020

Check out my ‘story’ on my personal page to see me read an excerpt from a personal essay I wrote about (a piece I found during excavation work, which I wrote about 3 years ago.) The full essay will be available, along with a small collection of other personal pieces sometime in 2021.

11/26/2020

Ask and you shall receive.

I'm not religious but I've said this to myself a lot over the past two weeks-laughingly, ironically, through tears, while shaking my head at myself.

I'm not religious but I grew up Catholic and it rolls through my brain and off my tongue with ease: Ask and you shall receive. It's in there deep. I mean they really worm their way in.

I started clawing around the dirt in the grave of the past and I got filthy- I'm talking caked in mud and you've gotta be hosed-down before they'll let you come inside. Ask and you shall receive. And as I stood three feet deep in soil, the past reacted to being disturbed- it fought to keep its slumber by presenting me with my grief.

My grief, my grief, my grief- now my oldest friend, who asked to be seen too, if I was coming home for a spell.

Self-reflective work is a funny thing. At once liberating and limiting, it calls upon the creator to know their own truth about the difference between creating with intention and living out loud. My grief -although a part of me, and therefore, everything I do- does not belong to this project, and the project does not belong to my grief.

So I decided to spend some time there.
I did yard-work with grief.
I dusted with grief.
I drank a strong IPA late in the night with grief.
I took a walk around the lake with grief.
I sat beside grief and drank my morning coffee staring out the window.

And now, I -the present-, with grief by my side, will continue to excavate the past, as the future stands by sarcastic.



Margaret Muriel Legere

11/17/2020

Sometimes you just have to take a break from your phone.
The excavation continues but I’m taking a tiny cellular hiatus. TTYS.