First a melody, that of Syracuse, composed in 1962 by Henri Salvador. Without, at the opening of the show, the lyrics written by Bernard Dimey for this song originally performed by Jean Sablon. Then a recorded voice, that of Richard Bohringer. He reads the poem When my heart will be by Dimey, which was sung by Charles Aznavour in 1983. “As we know that the dead never answer you / About me, everyone will say anything / That I was the most beautiful of poets in the absence. » And here, on the stage of the Essaïon Theater in Paris, Dominique Dimey. “I was 20 when I arrived in Paris. With almost nothing, my guitar and my suitcase. » A silence, a smile: “it’s cliche”. She adds : “My name was Dominique Blanchard, brought up by my mother. »
At the end of the 1970s, Dominique found accommodation in Montmartre. Small steep streets, Pigalle below. With the bars, the inhabitants, a rather popular environment, the traders, the mobsters, the tramps, the artists, those of the cabarets, the striptease halls, the painters of the Place du Tertre, the prostitutes. In the morning she goes to the Lux Bar, which still exists. She took theater lessons from Jean-Laurent Cochet, rue Blanche, wrote her first songs, earned her first fees.
One day in April 1978, on a poster she sees “a big bearded man”, Bernard Dimey, announced Salle Pleyel for five evenings. She has already met him in the neighborhood, at the Lux Bar. She goes to Pleyel, is conquered by the poems of Dimey, by his voice. At the exit, they exchange a few words. The days pass, Bernard and Dominique discuss from time to time, reveal themselves little by little. She didn’t know her father, he had an affair twenty years ago with a woman. Dominique is 20 years old. Same city, same first name of the mother, of the wife. One evening, he launches out: “It’s stupid, well you see, I think you could be my family. »
“Incredible encounter”
So here is the “incredible meeting” mentioned in the subtitle of the show Bernard Dimey father & daughter. Without pathos, but with emotion, tenderness, anger too – “I had dreamed of a dead father (…) and there was a fat and dirty father” –, Dominique Dimey, recounts and sings the one she will only know for a few years. She reads to him for hours the poems he writes, his passion since adolescence. In the show, she cites several of them. She also sings his song texts, which he said while writing them that he had “Choose the easy way out” – What a mistake ! Paris by heart, for Ferrat, The child made up for Aznavour, Syracuse, sure, But if I have nothing for Yves Montand, My feather thing for Zizi Jeanmaire… He died on the 1is July 1981, a few days before his 50th birthday.
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