Christian Lapointe likes challenges in the theater. The marathon and daredevil shows, the exploded works, the unclassifiable authors, the symbolist universes… All this motivates the director and his Quebec company, Carte blanche, which has a busy Montreal autumn.
Next month, Christian Lapointe tackles Parents and Friends Are Invited to Attend by Hervé Bouchard, an important author, crowned with prizes, but whose plays are deemed impossible to produce. For almost 20 years ! “Hervé Bouchard is the greatest challenge, in terms of contemporary repertoire, launched in the middle of Quebec theater,” wrote Paul Lefebvre in the magazine Liberté.
Ideal dramatic material for Lapointe! The latter reduced the text from 280 pages to 65 pages. By keeping the main characters of this vast family fresco, both confusing and close to us. Halfway between the story, the poem, the novel and the theater, “this disproportionate work depicts a very rich word,” according to Lapointe.
Bouchard’s play tells the story of the disappearance of a world, to inaugurate a new one, through a story of mourning around a “handled” widow, an armless mother, stuck in “a wooden dress”, with her four children now fatherless. We find in the cast: Lise Castonguay, Ève Pressault, Sylvio Arriola, Gabriel Szabo, and a newcomer, Tiffany Montambault.
Parents and friends… therefore invite the public to attend an overflowing ceremony, in a polyphonic language, woven with powerful monologues interspersed with Beckett-style dialogues
“We are at the same time in the dreamlike, the play of masks and the mechanisms of the theater making”, summarizes the director, happy to finally be able to bring to the stage (he has been thinking about it since… 2007!) iconoclastic and tragicomic universe of the author from Saguenay.
In addition to the creation at Quat’Sous, Lapointe presents at Usine C, as part of the International Literature Festival (FIL), Not one of these people. The fourth Martin Crimp play he is directing is only on display until September 30.
Crimp is a British author who is quite familiar in our lands: “I would say that he is the most performed foreign author in Quebec,” says Lapointe. All nationalities combined. He has a slightly acid humor which unfolds well in our language. »
Thanks to artificial intelligence, Crimp makes 300 fictional figures taken from his imagination speak in his play. “A kind of vox pop of a questionnaire that an author could have asked. It’s a “digital” mask game. Then Crimp, who is not an actor, lent himself to the game,” says Lapointe, who will replace the author to play in French.
Not one of these people also addresses the legitimacy of fiction. Crimp was struck “by the anxiety” of today’s young playwrights about what they are “allowed” to write. “As a playwright – whose job it is to create conflict between invented humans, with diverse characteristics and biographies, and opposing but equally valid points of view – I told myself that their anxiety was unfounded ; but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that my answer to their question was not adequate,” Crimp wrote in a production note.
“For me, the issue behind cultural appropriation is a problem of distributive justice,” says Lapointe, well aware that the issue is delicate and complex. “When France makes a film about Celine Dion, there is no problem. If a creator puts Bavarian music in a room, there is no problem. Quebecers and Bavarians have had (and still have) the means to tell their stories. But Indigenous people in Canada, for example, have never really received millions of dollars to tell their stories everywhere. If the culture from which you draw has not been able to benefit from the means and visibility that your own culture enjoys, you have a problem of distributive justice. »
A notable figure in Quebec dance, choreographer Paul-André Fortier signs his very first theatrical production with Les arcanes. Here he directs actor Étienne Pilon, alone on stage to play Fred, a computer programmer haunted by scraps of memories. The piece, at the crossroads of dance and theater, is intended to be a reflection on transmission and the imprints left on memory. Tristan Malavoy’s text navigates between several temporalities, multiplying the back and forth between the past and the present.
After presenting several shows in public spaces in Montreal, creator Hugo Fréjabise arrives on an institutional stage, in this case that of the Jean-Claude-Germain room at the Center du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui. The play Équinoxe, which he wrote and directed, focuses on the questions of a theater troupe gathered in a chalet. Together, the actors question the meaning of theater, its contribution to society and the way art is practiced depending on whether the country is at war or at peace.
The play Koulounisation toured several cities in Europe and made a notable appearance at the OFF Avignon festival in 2022. It arrives in the main room of the Prospero as a major North American premiere. The text signed by the Belgian author, actor and director Salim Djaferi addresses the thorny issue of French colonization in Algeria, with an approach like a link between documentary theater and the visual arts.
The new director of Espace Libre, Félix-Antoine Boutin, gave carte blanche to Evelyne de la Chenelière and Morena Prats for the creation of two shows grouped under the title Battements. See my eyes, where Evelyne de la Chenelière combines her talent with that of musician Vincent Legault, is presented from September 26 to 30. This interval will follow, from October 3 to 7, a piece imagined by Morena Prats and bringing together eight performers. Two poetic propositions, installed in this intangible space that exists between each of us.
The dystopian thriller L’inframonde is back at the Fred-Barry room of the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier after a first appearance in 2020. Mixing drama and science fiction, this text by American Jennifer Haley, translated by Étienne Lepage, explores the impact of technologies on our society. Set in an imminent future, the play directed by Catherine Vidal brings together five performers, including Rose-Anne Déry and Igor Ovadis.