A story of SOLIDARITY ....which is current ....

The Bremen Town Musicians is a fairy tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm . It appears in Tales of Childhood and Home in the second edition of 1819.

This tale inspired Amélie Laffaiteur for this motif from the Spring Summer 2020 collection

A donkey, who had been doing services all his life, became old and tired, unable to work anymore, decided to leave his master, who had decided to have him killed to get his skin back! Frightened by this idea, the donkey took the road to Bremen, he thought he could become a musician there, in order to grow old peacefully. On the way, he met a dog who was whining, he was moaning that he could no longer run, no longer hunt, so his master wanted to knock him out. The dog of course ran away, but he did not know where to go. The donkey invited him to follow his path, to become, both of them, future musicians…

And so on, the donkey will have encounters, which punctuate the story, then the four friends reunited, a final encounter will seal their friendship and their future.

Indeed, unity is strength in this humorous story about solidarity in the face of adversity, and thus reinforces the instructive moral of this tale: "He who thought he was catching, the hunted."

".............Musicians are not musicians, but castaways. They are rejected by a society that has used them as long as it could, and now that they are too old and can no longer provide the same amount of profit to their masters, they are separated from each other, or else they are destined for the pan.....

They form a band around the minimum that remains to them: a little art, a little music. The band is the moment of the recomposition of a solidarity that has been lacking in society as it is. In this one, what is no longer useful is thrown away. This is much more true of our society than of that of the tales. But it is a truth that the latter already carry.

Those who are rejected from all sides do not reject each other. They form a band. They form a society. They form a society around a project that has art as its means and safety as its end. They remake society as wandering artists, but around a social claim. They fight against what has been lacking.

These lame ducks are worn out by a life of work, service, and domesticity, from which they have been unable to expect any gratitude. Together, they reinvent art. A frightening art, no doubt, that we will not listen to for entertainment .........

Not a star, the glow of a dive. Salvation comes through the inversion of ordinary plunder. The band of musicians will chase away the band of brigands. The sick animals of the profit society will take revenge on the thieves. They will show that one can rob thieves, scare the scary, the powerful. They demonstrate this by exhibiting their true solidarity , the mutual support of the animal pyramid , one on the other, while the thieves, literally, scatter. The thieves are the unveiled face of the bourgeois society of oppression that almost killed them after having worn them down to the bone. The reversal is perfect. Their opposition overthrows them, strong in what they do not have. The song is enough to make them flee.

For sure, they are not adepts of bel canto. They sing out of tune, no doubt, and their guitar has only broken strings. No matter. Their appropriation of the art endows them with a magical power that would not only frighten the "honest people" who no longer needed them, but which is also able to drive away highwaymen, who are the truth of the previous ones. The voice that is not usually recognized in animals is the force that broke the window. The door to a new home was opened to them by a fierce art that they invented as a war cry...... "

Creating a pattern.....from pencil to garment.....