His first show, the brilliant Post humans, will have known an “unexpected” success, attracting, to its great pleasure, a wide variety of audiences. Since 2017, in addition to touring in Quebec and playing at the Schaubühne in Berlin, the creator tackling transhumanism has participated in conferences in various non-theatrical environments, spoken in front of 2000 specialists in information technologies, chatted with several philosophers … “I am really happy that the theater allowed so much discussion. And even outside the room, the debate continues. It’s so rich! “
In i / O, Dominique Leclerc continues to scrutinize techno-utopias and their aims to improve people. “With the theater, I have a freedom, an incredible playground to explore this subject. I can allow myself to dive into a really sensitive experience, to go into science, philosophy, personnel. I’m not saying that I want to work on this all my life, but I feel that there are still a lot of areas that I have not explored. “
“In fact, it’s like I put on glasses that I can’t get rid of anymore,” she says. My vision of the world is constantly colored by these speeches: technology will save us. “And it is a field which is constantly evolving, notes the one who is sent every day an” incredible quantity “of articles. “It’s hard to distinguish between what is pseudoscience and what is science that may happen in the near future or in the very distant future. What is realistic or not? There are a lot of things that we thought were completely unrealistic that are now real. “
In this new creation, Dominique Leclerc is therefore interested in “our complex relationship to new technologies, in connection with our finiteness and our obsolescence”. If in Post humans she made it her duty to demystify the little-known concepts of this transhumanist world towards which we are heading, she now wants to “get a little more into the philosophical concepts” and their effects in real life, without having to explain .
Mixing reality and fiction, the show combines an autobiographical plot, around the death of the author’s father, and excerpts from interviews with personalities of this vast movement, also filmed for a feature-length documentary that the artist is preparing with the ‘National Film Board. In what she describes as “science-friction”, she has tried to put these interviews in opposition, so that points of view collide and respond to each other.
The show, co-directed this time by Olivier Kemeid, is a “more personal experience” than the previous one, she says. “We could have done a sequel, quite simply. But it was important to try to go elsewhere, in the form as well. Of course there are echoes between the two pieces. But I built this one so that those who haven’t seen the first one won’t feel left out. “
Build an archive
i / O – with reference to the term IT input / output – also talks about the stories that shape us, science and science fiction influencing each other, according to Dominique Leclerc. “Often the people I meet have been inspired by novels they’ve read, movies they’ve seen. The problem is that it is very difficult to project yourself into the future without falling into a dystopia. And that’s what I mainly try to fight against. “This was particularly true during the pandemic, when everything was there” so that [son] brain [l]’leads to catastrophic scenarios’. The play is therefore also an attempt to look into tomorrow without falling into a dystopia, to create “other futures”.
And this project benefits from a partnership with the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University in Ontario. “There is a lot of confusion, especially in the French language, between transhumanism and post-humanism”, notes the creator, specifying that she sees herself “obliged to make big generalities” to distinguish between the first, contrasting movement but very technophile, who wants to create a “superhuman”, and the second, more “culturophile, post-dualism, post-anthropocentric”.
“We see with the pandemic, with the climate emergency, that it no longer works, to put people at the center. We have to reposition ourselves. “And post-humanism, which sees the human as a plural notion, which is not only the technology that it creates, but also” the environment with which we are constantly in contact “, now speaks to him much more than transhumanism.
In i / O, she therefore enjoys building an archive directly for the humans of tomorrow. A “mausoleum” in which she deposits objects exhumed from her past, but also references to the stories that she was told in her youth and which shaped her, from the robot Astro to Jesus!
A corpus to which the technology companies who have been accumulating massive amounts of data on us since 2001 have not had access. know for myself what I need. The info that they have on me, I don’t know where it is, who has access to it, but it will probably never be erased. However, they still miss 20 years of my life. I bet it’s not true that I am perfectly known. What is still mine? So this archive is a bit of an answer. This is the legacy. “
Because at 40, Dominique Leclerc “begins to realize” that she will not have children. “Am I bequeathing something? »She draws a parallel between the perception of her aging body” going towards disuse “and the obsolete objects that are part of her past – such as the View-Master that she shows us during the interview at the Center du Today’s Theater.
Ritual
The mausoleum is also the ritual she did not have to say goodbye to her father. With her partners Patrice Charbonneau-Brunelle and Jérémie Battaglia, the actress creates “a ritual in complete freedom” on stage. “We are sorely lacking in rituals right now, even outside of the pandemic. My father used to tell me that when he was little, his dead mother was on display for three days in the living room. Today, we have a dispossession of the body, it is a company that does everything, it goes quickly. Then boom, he left, we didn’t understand anything. “
The piece therefore testifies to the difficulty of having lost a loved one during confinement, without knowing what we had the right to do at the funeral. “It was completely crazy. Besides, I would very much like politicians to come, to be confronted with a real story. We were told: no right to have more than one [invité] in the House. Does my mother really have to choose between her two children? Meanwhile, the shopping centers were open …
However, it is above all an acceptance of mourning, of our ephemerality, in the face of a movement that rejects finitude. “I see tools appear that will repel mourning, or completely destroy it. »Like a digital avatar that would allow you to converse with a deceased loved one based on data collected. “It’s easy to condemn, to say that we won’t go towards this until we live it. But the day when we are offered these tools, when we are in full suffering … “In short, Dominique Leclerc asks himself this question:” Am I part of the last generation who must learn to let go? “