Dystopia, anticipation, uchronia: once mainly reserved for screens, these forward-looking genres, stories projecting themselves into alternative realities or dark futures, seem to have taken more of their place on the scene in recent years.
“I have the impression that artists are always kind of canaries in the mine, advances Sarah Berthiaume. What is woven in the collective anguish perhaps emerges first in the works, because we are called upon to talk about what lives in us. And from the environment to the war, the spirit of the times is gloomy. “Collectively, we are obsessed with our end. It’s therapeutic, maybe, to talk about it and see it, to make peace with it. »
The author will create Wollstonecraft in mid-April at the Quat’Sous, where is currently played You are an animal alternate history in which Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard imagines Charles Darwin today. “For me, it’s a bit like ‘what would happen if Mary Shelley created today?’ I also take a historical figure that I project into the future and watch how it develops. There is a little laboratory side there, mad scientist [rires]. This is why I think there is something liberating and playful in these forms. »
Camped in the near future, against a backdrop of crisis and an unruly climate, Wollstonecraft is a “very, very free rewrite of Frankenstein“. Like Shelley at the time, Sarah Berthiaume was inspired by new advances in science and technology to imagine her creature. We see a disillusioned author, who is unable to give birth, put her frozen fetus in a 3D printer and create a living baby from it… The piece deals in particular with the conflicting relationship to creation, to these “works which, after , escape us, which we love but which we also hate”.
Technology
“Quebec’s creative theater is one of the art forms most committed to reflecting the world in which we live, and sometimes to being a little forward-looking in relation to where we are going. So it’s not surprising that we see dystopias. »
Director of Premier Acte, the only room in Quebec devoted to theatrical talent, Marc Gourdeau notes this interest from young creators: the broadcaster has received several projects with dystopian content for the 2022-2023 season, and has programmed three of them, “very different”. .
Marc Gourdeau thinks that the pandemic is no stranger to this phenomenon. “We were put on hiatus for two years. Did it bring [artistes] to project themselves further into the future, to wonder how it was going to be afterwards? None of these proposals is very pleasing. And the pandemic brought us more and more into the virtual universe, a big part of our life was spent online. ” Gold, Box Exp.creation by Lauriane Charbonneau, inspired by the TV series black-mirror And The Underworldby the American Jennifer Haley, a science fiction thriller which will be presented in mid-March, are “deeply rooted in the digital universe”. We already smelled dynamite in the Stone Ageby Natalie Fontalvo and Charlie Cameron-Verge, was more of a political dystopia, set in the aftermath of World War III.
There is also that the prospective discourse is very present in society, believes Marc Gourdeau. “With the ecological question, we try to see where we will be in so many years. It seems that the public space is almost dystopian, in the sense that we project ourselves into the future more than ever, in a bunch of domains. »
In addition to the general anxiety that feeds this emergence, the advance of technology, for example “the arrival of the screen in the theater, makes it possible to enter these universes more easily”, mentions Claude Poissant. As soon as he took office, the artistic director of the Denise-Pelletier theater (TDP) was aware that part of the public he was addressing, schoolchildren, “generally likes these futuristic universes”.
“And it’s very funny, because I received three offers to ride 1984 , by three different directors, in two months. It was a sign. In addition to Orwell’s 2016 classic, the TDP has since staged an adaptation of the brave new worldby Guillaume Corbeil (2019) and hosted in the Fred-Barry room last fall, Plastic, a creation by Félix Emmanuel and Zoé Girard set in 2122, in a world without oil. Three shows that “marketed very strongly” with both audiences.
science fiction
For Cédric Delorme-Bouchard, if the theater has explored the universes of the future much less than the stories of the past, “science fiction [s.-f.], like mythology, has the power to open doors to address very universal issues. I think that by projecting ourselves, whether in the past or in the future, we have no choice but to escape our everyday reality to open up to the great fundamental questions that cross the human experience. . »
The creator — who will bring another literary work by s.-f. next season — resumes The employeesin April, at the Prospero. Even if this adaptation of the Danish novel by Olga Ravn takes place in the very distant future, the story reflects, he believes, anxieties similar to those we feel today in the face of radical capitalism, the ecological crisis or the “the withering away of human relations”.
“What I like about this type of anticipation work is that it doesn’t have a single subject. It is a warning of many dangers that may lie in wait for the humans of the future. And this is what is interesting: [le spectateur] connects with the fears that echo with his personal journey. The employees , it’s a multitude of small possible dystopias, but through which there are also doors for possible utopias. »
For Geneviève L. Blais, who staged the climatic dystopia in September Nostalgia 2175 by Anja Hilling, gender “creates a space that allows us to see things from a distance. We feel protected, because we talk about the future, not here now. And because we lower our guards, our defenses, I have the impression that the show can hit us in a sometimes very strong way. »
“This allows us to reflect on a state of affairs, by projecting and being able to go as far as we want since we do not have a present anchor”, adds Martin Bellemare, author in 2015 of Freedom— a play set in the near future where suicide is a service offered by the government…
The playwright and director came together to create THE future , presented at Usine C from February 14 to 23. Both a “gesture of anger and an artistic one”, the piece originates from the Manifesto of Futurismof 1909 and the observation by Bellemare that the values that this movement claimed “dominate today, unfortunately: a lot of authority, violence, technological progress”. As if our present was the dystopia of this past, what…
For the author, this is an attempt to sublimate the current state of things by offering a “closed door that addresses our helplessness and our exasperation”. The protagonist of Future, she decides to do a symbolic act: kill the richest person in the world… If the text deals with our present, it can have a mirror effect, believes its author: “We are the future of the futurists. What will ours be? »
As for Martin Bellemare’s next play, it will be set in 2145, thus giving the Quebec author the legitimacy to write about a situation outside Canada (a mysterious subject that he does not yet want to reveal). “The future temporal transposition allows me to approach a subject that [sinon] I couldn’t get into and gives me an angle that I couldn’t have otherwise — in relation to all these questions of appropriation. It gives me a shift, which also allows me to consider the material with a little more humor than if I treated it in a raw way today, since it is burning. »
Claude Poissant rightly considers that the dystopian form, with its universe to invent, this “pass for anywhere”, offers freedom to creators “in a world where we are more and more constrained”. A genre apparently “sometimes less constraining — despite all the rigor it requires to be coherent — than accurately reporting on a past that has existed, where one feels one has to be very precise”, or holding up a mirror to a present in the face of which one can lack perspective. “So I have the impression that the future world, what we can imagine, is a space of freedom. »