The 40and edition of the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) will be the finest in its long history: more than 1,000 films have been submitted to the programmers, who have retained about a fifth to concoct the poster. Among them are a record number of films imagined from stage performances, as the last two pandemic years have forced performing arts such as dance and theater to turn to cinema to continue to exist in the world. public eye, which raises an existential question: what happens to the performing arts when transposed to cinema?
In recent pandemic months, we have seen a number of stage performances adapted to the television format appear on small screens. Télé-Québec led the way by offering theater (The Assemblybroadcast in March 2021), dance (lost melodies, “an incursion by Ballets jazz Montréal into the poetic universe of Patrick Watson”, presented last January) and musical concerts. This manna of new art films, fertilized by the financial aid of the various levers of cultural development of the governments, benefits today the FIFA, which begins on March 15th.
“Particularly with regard to the artistic practice of dance”, confirms Jacinthe Brisebois, director of the festival’s programming. It received so many dance film submissions — “and a lot of great films” — that the festival scheduled a Nuit de la danse, presented March 18 at the Outremont theater (see sidebar on next page). More than 60% of the works presented during this Night were created here, in Quebec.
The meeting between dance and cinema has already been established for several years, notes Jacinthe Brisebois, referring to the approach of choreographer and filmmaker Édouard Lock, “but the pandemic has certainly been an accelerator of this kind of production. However, recordings of stage performances on camera, as if the spectator were in the room, there are fewer and fewer of them; we talk more and more about what we could call immersive recordings. […] It’s not at all the same energy as that which emanates from a scene, but on the big screen, it’s fabulous to see this type of film. »
Transposition, immersion
Like the short film excess, co-directed by filmmaker Xavier Curnillon and choreographer Louise Bédard. Retained in the official selection, Short films category, the film leaves the framework of a traditional scene to invest the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, its architecture having inspired the movements imagined by Bédard.
“This requires reflection, explains Xavier Curnillon. What is it that we capture on camera, how do we capture it and what comes out of that? The emotion that emerges from the film is then completely different from that which one feels” when one attends in a room, live, the performance of the dancers. By making a film in a setting chosen on purpose, “we completely leave a work of dance for the stage; we take the essence of the things that Louise anchors in the movement and we bring it elsewhere. In a movie. »
The pandemic has given theater and dance companies time to consider a better suited way to deliver their work in the absence of a live audience. In the same way that some musicians have thought beyond the framework of simply recording a concert, as Klô Pelgag did (To live. The spectral spectacle), Marie Davidson & The Naked Eye (Renegade Breakdown Live) and Plants & Animals (Jungleby Yann-Manuel Hernandez, world premiere at FIFA), the worlds of dance, theater and even opera and circus will offer unique works at the festival.
Thus, it will be possible to see a cinematographic version of the Gounod of Faust, featuring the Opéra national de Paris and directed by Julien Condemine. “They call it an immersive opera, specifies Jacinthe Brisebois, because it was shot in a theater, of course without an audience, but at some point, we leave to find ourselves on the Champs Élysées. Further, we see the singers on horseback, and there is even animation on the screen – we are really somewhere else! It doesn’t replace performing arts at all, but it multiplies the possibilities. »
Alternative solution
Presented as a world premiere, the feature film The sum of our dreams, co-directed by Jérémie Battaglia and Johanne Madore, invents a cinema with circus and contemporary dance. This work would never have seen the light of day without the pandemic since at its base there is what should have been the end-of-year show of the National Circus School of Montreal, which could never have been presented in the room. The approach is similar to that which gave birth to the feature film pigeon projectscripted and directed by actor and playwright Emmanuel Schwartz and featuring the cohort of graduates of Lionel-Groulx College’s theater performance program.
In the spring of 2020, Schwartz was to give a writing workshop there, but the pandemic upset his lesson plan, “especially since we could not see each other, in the presence, he says. I quickly saw that the students were distraught by the situation, so I surveyed them to find out their interest in writing a film. I was simply saying to myself: wouldn’t it be nice to write a film in a closed-door context, so the kind of film that can be shot with any camera, and which brings together the actors’ tools that they acquired during their theater training? »
When it became clear that the theatrical production could not take place in front of an audience in the fall of 2020, the college management offered Emmanuel Schwartz to use the budget provided to shoot a film. “At the time when they would have played their first show, the students rather shot this film, says its director. The originality is that they rehearsed it like a theater show”, which is felt from the first scenes: the tempo, the lines that spin, these are theater actors performing for the cameras. Corn pigeon project is not theatre, because what is theater without the audience? Without live performance, in presence, in a common place, a shared emotion?
What is it, exactly, pigeon project ? Emmanuel Schwartz bursts out laughing: “Damn good question! I don’t know what they are, and I don’t claim to know them. Above all, I have the impression that it’s a huge chance to be able to try things in this context. »