Every week in the summer The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard during the summer season. This week, Sarah-Louise Pelletier-Morin, doctoral candidate in literary studies at UQAM, discusses the politicization of theatre, a phenomenon that goes far beyond our current affairs.
I looked for a quiet corner in the Biergarten, which was bustling despite the late hour. Luckily, the table at the end of the garden was empty; it was also the most vegetal area of the place, and in fact the insects kept buzzing in my ear. The tranquility would not be total, but it would be enough for me to take a few notes.
This scene from my stay in Munich illustrates a fundamental dimension of doctoral studies: a thesis is an object that you take with you everywhere. Thinking requires above all time and solitude, so our research subject comes, after a few years, to require a great mental availability, to the point of inhabiting us permanently, to insinuate itself into all things. And sometimes, we take out a piece of paper at midnight to jot down some ideas.
I was then coming out of an immersive performance entitled Respublika and I wanted to preserve a trace of this play which embodied a radical form of politicization of the theatre. About fifty people had gathered that evening in the Utopia space, a former merry-go-round, to attend the re-enactment (Wiederaufführung) of an experiment that led a group of multilingual people to retreat to the Lithuanian forests for several weeks.
Spectators were invited to experience an evening within this “restricted republic” and to take part in the characters’ existential dialogue, which questioned the current meaning of the word community, passing from one station to another (kitchen, living room, bedroom, sauna, bathroom, terrace, etc.). The performance, lasting six hours, ended with a raveconsidered here as an “act of resistance to fight against the feeling of powerlessness of our time” (I translate the words of the director Łukasz Twarkowski).
A politicized art
“Redefining the meaning of community”, “rethinking ways of living together”, “resisting”: these are all constituent terms of the emancipatory paradigm that mobilizes many theater artists today. For the time being, the theater is without doubt the art that makes pens and costumes, narratives and means of production, programs and sets the most move in this direction, that is to say that the stage is conceived in a continuum with the public space — theatre, in a word, is a politicized art.
The politicization of the theater is a phenomenon that goes far beyond our current events. Since the Poetic of Aristotle, this living art has never ceased Urbi and orbi to become permeable to the affairs of the City, to ask questions of propriety and propriety, to be the subject of debates and censorial measures, to act as a political lever – which one thinks, in France, to the subversive laughter of Molière, to the didactic plays of Sartre, to the recent committed stagings of David Bobée; in Germany, to the scandalous productions of Frank Wedekind, to the proletarian theaters of Piscator and the epic of Brecht, which today stimulate the creations of a Thomas Ostermeier; to the feminist performances of the Spaniard Angélica Liddell; to the work of Ivo van Hove in Belgium; in Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed in Brazil… It would be easy to extend this list as the examples abound.
Quebec, moreover, is no exception to this phenomenon. The politicization of the theater has moreover taken absolutely singular forms, to say the least patent, in our history.
I remember, when I was finishing my secondary studies, being marked by the tumult caused by the arrival of Bertrand Cantat for the women cycle edited by Wajdi Mouawad at the TNM, in 2011. I have an unforgettable memory of Serge Denoncourt at Everybody talks about it : “Who is Wajdi Mouawad? Is it the pope? “I felt the same amazement in 2018 at the extent of the controversies that erupted around the shows SLAV and Kanata.
How to explain that the theater, this marginal art which attracts only a limited pool of spectators in the big cities, is the subject of such lively debates in the public space? Fifty years after the controversy of sisters-in-law (1968), forty years after the scandal of Fairies are thirsty (1978), the theater found itself at the heart of controversy three times between 2010 and 2020. Something, clearly, was repeated in our history.
An accelerator of history
We would no doubt have forgotten these theatrical controversies if they had not had, each in its own way, a truly transformative effect on Quebec society. By inviting joual onto the stage, Tremblay’s theater attracted an audience less educated in the theatre, while the demands of Fairies gave voice to feminist mobilization. Recently, the Cantat case has launched a dialogue on rehabilitation and violence against women, while the cases SLAV and Kanata drew attention to issues such as cultural appropriation and cultural diversity in the arts community.
If these various debates have certainly divided the public space in two, bringing with them a violence that has left very real consequences on some people, one thing is certain: these controversies have profoundly transformed the theatrical environment – some will say for the better. Whatever one thinks of the polemical mode and the verbal violence that it induces, such democratic conflicts also have their virtues; controversy sometimes acts as an accelerator of history.
In Anna Karenina (1878), Tolstoy wrote that ” [l]he happy families are all alike; unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way”. The same logic seems to apply to societies: harmonious societies all tend to resemble each other; dissensual societies are dissensual each in its own way. Quebecers have their own way of conducting their democratic conflicts.
In our society – which is said to be cautious and timorous, incapable of debate – what should be deduced from the fact that the theater arouses so many passions and that through it debate seems possible? Everything leads us to believe that our thorniest questions of society are better posed without frontality, when we step aside, borrowing, so to speak, the neutrality of artistic cover. There, in this detour, a fundamental characteristic of the Quebec identity is revealed.