The theater community is also in mourning this Friday. Jacques Vézina, a great builder of the cultural community and an ardent defender of Quebec creation, died Thursday evening at the age of 72, following cancer.
Posted at 12:51 p.m.
“It’s a huge loss, valuable expertise for the community that is disappearing,” said Marie-Thérèse Fortin, joined by The Press in Vancouver where she plays Distress and Enchantment. “Jacques was a thinker, a visionary, with a very fine analysis of the ecology of the theater community in Quebec”, adds the one who co-directed the Center du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui (CTD’A) with Vézina for 8 years. .
For nearly two decades at the CTD’A, Jacques Vézina has strengthened the dialogue between the artistic and the administrative. It made it possible to make more room for creative companies, by promoting a model of co-dissemination of shows. “He considered his administrative work to be also artistic. He managed the house well to allow artists to shine better,” illustrates Marie-Thérèse Fortin.
“I am infinitely grateful for the place he gave me at the Center du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui; from the one he allowed me to take above all, with a lot of freedom, wrote the current artistic director of the CTD’A, Sylvain Bélanger, on Facebook Friday morning. He gave 15 great years of his life to the CTD’A. Vézina was in charge of the theater on rue St-Denis from 1998, with René Richard Cyr, until 2013.
From FTA to CAC
After studying theater production at the National Theater School of Canada, Jacques Vézina founded the Festival de théâtres des Amériques (FTA) with Marie-Hélène Falcon in 1985. In addition to his major role with the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, Vézina has been very involved in several associations and companies. He has held positions for organizations such as the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC), where he led the redesign of arts granting programs, from 2015 to 2017. He has also collaborated with the Center for Dramatic Authors (CEAD) and Culture Montréal, where he founded the Journées de la culture with Louise Sicuro.
“During my first years at the Canada Council for the Arts, I had the immense privilege and happiness of entrusting him with the architecture of a new funding model that will have marked the history of this institution”, declared the director and CCA CEO, Simon Brault, in an interview at The Press. “Jacques was an endearing, intelligent, curious, open and funny man. His advice was thoughtful and based on exemplary intellectual rigor and experience from which he knew how to draw lessons with wisdom and courage. »
Mr. Brault stressed the importance of his support for emerging artists and the transmission of knowledge to new generations of cultural managers. This is confirmed by the testimony of Vincent de Repentigny, co-director general of Prospero, via Facebook. “Jacques Vézina opened wide the doors of the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui to allow the [festival] OFFTA to take root. I was very young and inexperienced. I discovered the strength and the wisdom, the listening and the intelligence, of this admirable man. Jasmine [Catudal] and I were producing an event of international scope for the first time. Jacques was responsible for the administrative management of this vast project. »
The sense of the common good
These tributes which surge on Friday, the day after his death at the Hôtel-Dieu, hardly surprise his friend Simon Brault: “Jacques was eternally young and he was always ready to embark on a new adventure to restore dignity to the world, justice and the future without which life has little meaning. He was aware of the common good, of history and of the individual responsibility that falls to us to contribute to it with all that we have and with all that we are. »
Jacques Vézina leaves to mourn, among others, his spouse Michèle Laliberté, his daughter Delphine and his three grandchildren.