Plusurs en ai oïz conter: Performance and the Dramatic Poetics of Voice in the lais of Marie de France

Summary

The human voice resonates in Marie de France's narrative lais. She says in her prologue that ‘plusurs en ai oïz conter / nes vueil laissier ne obliër’ (I heard many of them told / I do not want to let them go or forget them [ll. 39–40]). Today we still discuss her crafting of a collection of stories to join the succession of poets and performers who retransmitted aventures and made them memorable. Modern readers and scholars of Marie's lais connect to this continuum of reception and transmission, bringing individual approaches and knowledge to their analyses, as Marie suggests: ‘gloser la letre / e de lur sen le surplus metre’ (to interpret the text / and bring to bear on it their own wisdom [ll. 15–16]). One such approach is through storytelling performance, which uses theatrical elements – voice, tone, action, gesture, movement, staging, costumes and props – to bring out the voices in the text. I define ‘voices’ quite literally, as does Evelyn Birge Vitz: ‘the voices of the characters – voices that performers conjured up, impersonated and made listeners physically hear’. By giving sensory form to Marie's narrative voice and to the voices of her characters, performance elicits audience reaction and discussion in ways that solitary reading and traditional analysis do not. Performance leads to communal engagement and often to new textual analysis, as I have discovered through my own experience performing medieval farces and narratives over the past two decades. The question of voice, so important for the lais of Marie de France, lies at the core of this analysis.

Contemporary storytelling performances such as mine do not purport to replicate the oral telling of stories which occurred at Marie's time, with harp or rote in hand. Rather, they use modern acting techniques and gestures to frame, highlight and actualize Marie's lais so that contemporary audiences may share in a critical understanding of these texts that complements traditional literary analysis. In my performances, I use medieval costumes and settings, but forego strict adherence to realism in favor of presenting a broader range of interpretations. Michael Dixon suggests that ‘ending a reliance on conventions of realism that limit theatrical means and narrative imagination’ engenders ‘the exploration of form [that] can provide opportunities to discover or develop one's unique voice within a context that resonates in the new millennium rather than echoing cultural priorities of the past’.