Meet Paris-based collective Les Souffleurs that whispers poems to strangers

Les Souffleurs are in India to convince strangers to slow down by whispering poems into their ears

A few days ago, nine foreigners dressed in all-black and arrived at Kolkata’s Mullick Ghat flower market with a plan to “contaminate” it. The contaminant of choice was poetry, and they emptied it from their lips into the ears of locals by means of a hollow tube. These Frenchwomen and men are part of Les Souffleurs Commandos Poetiques, literally “The Whisperers, Poetic Commandos”, and such intervention-by-verse is their unique attempt to make people stop and smell the roses.

Olivier Comte started the group in 2001. The artist had written the line, “The children reproduce themselves from mouth to ear” for a theatre production then, which he later evolved into: “Humanity reproduces itself from mouth to ear.” The full power of poetry, he believes, is felt when someone hears it. So Comte dreamt up this version of spoken-word wisdom and called on fellow artists to join the cause. Some 36 writers, singers, comedians and filmmakers from France, and an equal number from Japan, have been travelling the world to whisper sweet somethings in public spaces. 

Nine of them are touring India currently, speaking lines not in their native French but in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and English. Rabindranath Tagore, Akhtar ul Iman and Kedarnath Singh are among the poets they are quoting. It took the collective six months to curate and prepare lines in Indian languages with help from a few coaches. In Kolkata, they made appearances at the Kolkata Literary Festival and in the French classrooms of Alliance Française and Institute Française en Inde, which are among the organisations that invited the artists to India. 

A still from an international performance by the collective

Many advised them against walking into the narrow, crowded Mullick Ghat market, says Nicolas Bilder, group member and comedian. But Les Souffleurs tend to thrive on audacity. At times, in Tokyo — where there are no public spaces and the private ownership of properties changes every few metres — they altogether skipped seeking permission to perform. Whenever the authorities paid them a visit, they would coo poetry into their ears too. “Policemen are very tough in Japan but they understood what we were trying and let us do it,” says Bilder. As such, their work is a mix of the meticulously planned and the blithely spontaneous. 

The group’s outfits also include black umbrellas. This is not for protection from the elements but to shield listeners, who are sometimes moved to tears, from emotional “inner rain”. Nobody in Kolkata cried, though. Instead, the air of secrecy about the whisperers attracted a circle of onlookers, who studied the faces of those whispering as well as those being whispered to. Most were amazed to hear foreigners reciting the words of Tagore and Debarati Mitra, says Comte. Some wondered if perhaps a tape was hidden in the black tubes. To counter this disbelief, the group plans to speak to people in Delhi and Bengaluru through black hand fans, a far less secretive medium. 

Les Souffleurs whispers lines into the ears of a driver in Kolkata

Les Souffleurs have since developed a number of concepts, which they call “gestures”. Two of these will be performed in India. There is “Appearances / Disappearances” for instance, where they simply arrive at a place, speak poetry to people there, and leave quickly. In “Brandishing Vagabond Writings”, they encourage participants to paint on black panels lines from poems that they like or which they are offered. The group later walks with these panels arranged to resemble a moving wall of poetry. They tested out “Tornade Selfies”, or “Selfie Tornado”, in Japan recently, where young children wrote postcards telling notorious world leaders including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Shinzo Abe about their dreams, and asking if they would be realised in this world. These cards, along with pictures of the children, were sent up into a tornado created with big fans.

Scenes from Les Souffleurs performance at Mullick Ghat flower market in Kolkata

Even if their title reads “commandos”, the approach is soft and slow. “Our philosophy is not political, it is poetical. But we take any comments about it being political as a compliment,” says Comte. It has been nearly two decades since he formed the collective but he observes that the need for interventions is still strong. “With all the turmoil of the world, we are constantly in a laboratory, searching. You find that poems, across territories and across periods, are eternal and that they have resonance.”
 

Les Souffleurs Commandos Poetiques will perform in Jaipur (January 25-27), Delhi (January 28-31) and Bengaluru (February 2-4)