The 22nde The Montreal Never Read Festival opens with the theme of “lucid joys”. An editorial line emanating from new texts selected and inspired by the current context. Sensing “something tense in society”, artistic and general director Marcelle Dubois wanted to bring to the fore what is at the very heart of a live art festival: the pleasure of coming together.
“My co-artistic directors [Jade Barshee, Gabrielle Lessard] of 2023 and I have the impression that joy, empathy is a much more stimulating engine for the future than anxiety or ambient gloom. But at the same time, the times require us to be lucid! And in the authors collected, some are more on the side of joy, others of lucidity. We travel between these two poles. Although the subjects may be difficult, the theatrical act itself, the act of coming together is joyful. »
Launched by Tiohtià:ké. Indigenous Story Mapping, a show in which six artists reclaim the history of Montreal, the event offers many activities, including nine readings of unpublished Quebec texts. And the series of performances offered free of charge from 6 to 7 is this year called the Chambers of Release.
Six speeches where, “each in their own way, the artists create a kind of social catharsis on different subjects to break a little from the shackles, the taboos, the ruts that prevent us, as a society or as an individual, from achieving joy. collective”, summarizes Marcelle Dubois. She cites the example of Les Parrfaites, a “group of seven women from the street, all rebuilding their lives, who use art to talk about their journey, but also to give themselves a empowerment “.
As for Nicolas Gendron, who met several nonagenarians to Break a legacy“he goes in search of what the elders have to say, to question the lack of consideration towards previous generations”.
The actress Lesly Velázquez sees in this intimate format a “very reassuring” space to make her voice as an emerging author heard. With Casa Chica, she tells, with an autobiographical touch, and also using objects, a family story. “I generally find family stories very crisp, because there are always secrets! I come from a very large family, thanks to my father, but we didn’t know we were many (laughs). »
The native of Mexico experiments with the genre of autofiction, which she describes as “making a pact with lies — memory is very selective, there is already a filter that is being made”. His text adopts the point of view of a child, because it is a look devoid of judgment on the family situation. It’s as an adult that you “begin to see that it’s not normal, or that it shouldn’t be. It is the adult who wants to go into the past to settle things”. What interests the author in this story is “to see that the human spectrum is really broad”.
There is also a very intimate part in Vincent Millard’s text. “It’s a subject that really interests me. In what I will say that evening, there are things that I have never said to anyone, ”says the author of the Room of Release noh 5, Open to all body diversity. A formula that this 2021 graduate of the Saint-Hyacinthe Theater School has often read in calls for advertising auditions.
By dint of reading this same sentence and others of the same type (“open to all ethnic groups!” illustrates Lesly Velázquez), he began to question its meaning. “It seems to mean: normally, we are not open to body diversity, but this time, yes. »
For this autobiographical documentary on the place of this diversity in the field of cast, Millard has conducted interviews in television and theater circles. And each person he met suggested another. “I think it’s something we want to hear about. He discusses the roles of “fat people who are still stereotyped today” – the artistic community is “a big ocean liner: it turns slowly”. This ex-child actor, who started at 12, also talks about his own experiences, the path traveled in his relationship to his body.
Catharsis
This carte blanche has its constraints: each performer-author must conclude with a gesture of release, to encourage the public to collective catharsis. Vincent Millard will take a “very symbolic” action. During our meeting, Lesly Velázquez was still hesitating between two gestures, one of which integrated the spectators into its liberating scope. If our interviewees reserve the surprise as to the form of this act, in both cases, it presents an intimate character.
“Often, we see the release as gestures of brilliance,” notes Marcelle Dubois. But that doesn’t necessarily mean breaking everything. Other discharge chambers correspond more to this principle. “Annick Lefebvre wrote Above all, do not tear your shirt in this spirit. She explores the feeling of anger in adulthood, testing the limits of this emotion that we are supposed to channel. With Model, Charlotte Gagné-Dumais works on how to break the models that form us, and will inevitably disappoint us, to become who we are. “She literally grinds her plasticine idols…
Often, we see the release as gestures of brilliance
Alternatively, defoulement may simply consist of bringing into view what is repressed, according to the director. As here by words. “Sometimes what will allow us to break down the walls limiting us as individuals or as a society, it just happens through a small crack that will open, and the dike will let go. And when the dike breaks, there is nothing more liberating. »