Part of the Zoofest team, an event swept away by the financial troubles of the Just for Laughs Group, will present from July 12 to 21 the Longueuil Comique Fest, a new festival with discovery as its key word, has learned The Press.
“For Stéphane and I, when we learned that Zoofest would not return, it was a no brainer: we had to launch our festival,” says Pierre-Luc Beaucage, who has worked since 2007 as tour director for Louis- José Houde, while his partner Stéphane Paquin has been the sound engineer since 2005.
It is to the company of these two veterans of the humor industry, Les Lou, that we owe the programming of the Fenplast room, located in the Charles-Lemoyne college in Longueuil, one of the favorite stages of up-and-coming comedians (in the very broad sense) and their more established colleagues, who like to showcase their new material there.
The pair of long-time friends also worked in the technical direction of Zoofest, the more daring and (gently) cheeky counterpart to the Just for Laughs festival which, since 2009, has given impetus to the careers of Jay Du Temple, Rosalie Vaillancourt, Pierre-Yves Roy-Desmarais, Katherine Levac and so many other now essential figures in the world of laughter.
“Pierre-Luc, Stéphane and I became professional soulmates,” exclaims Isabelle Desmarais, who began her career in humor as an unpaid intern at Zoofest eight years ago. She was preparing to launch her third program as general director of the event before learning, at the beginning of March, that there would be no laughing matter this summer in the Quartier des spectacles .
We immediately said to ourselves: if Rome collapses, it doesn’t matter, because there are better things to do, without being handcuffed by the traditional shackles of what the Just for Laughs Group allowed us to do. produce.
Isabelle Desmarais
Although she admits to having had a difficult time – we can well imagine – the death of the project which allowed her to taste her dream, the fervent lover of humor behind the programming of the new Longueuil Comique Fest arrives now, with the benefit of a few weeks of hindsight, to glimpse the salutary beginning of a new time.
“The end of the Just for Laughs Group is, in my eyes, a bit like burning a forest to let the young shoots emerge,” she illustrates. Even though it ended very ugly, and even though lots of people lost their jobs, I think we should know how to celebrate the moment when great things end. ” She smiles. “This is where I am in my grief. »
Laugh several times under one roof
A festival for the next generation? “It’s so difficult to distinguish who is up-and-coming and who isn’t,” answers Isabelle Desmarais with great accuracy, for whom the main objective of the Longueuil Comique Fest will consist of “introducing spectators to the extent to which Quebec humor has evolved, whether it’s artists who have been on stage for six months or ten years.”
As it was possible at the Monument-National, during the Zoofest, to attend two or three different shows in the same evening, the new Longueuil festival will take place in three spaces, including the Fenplast room, with around 140 seats, as well as in two classes with around fifty seats, one transformed into a comedy cabaret and the other into a podcast recording studio.
Isabelle Desmarais speaks of an “Olympic comedy village”, whose programming will include not only traditional stand-up, but also burlesque, drag and theater. Jérémie Larouche, Andy St-Louis, Thomas Levac, Rachelle Elie, Coco Belliveau, Anne-Sarah Charbonneau, David Beaucage, Brick & Brack, Douaa Kachache and Guillaume Boldock are among the first series of artists who agreed to take the metro to at the Longueuil–Université-de-Sherbrooke station.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Anne-Sarah Charbonneau will be part of the first edition of the Longueuil Comique Fest.
One thing is certain: within the Longueuil Comique Fest team, no one will regret not having to spend several days in downtown Montreal. “During Zoofest, we tried to schedule the events in locations not too far from each other, but it was always a huge challenge, because there are a lot of things happening downtown, including music. construction,” says the programmer laughing (yellow).
Why force people to come downtown when they don’t want to and when the South Shore is teeming with potential spectators?
Isabelle Desmarais
The death of Just for Laughs would mark “the end of a certain corporatism in humor” for the industry, analyzes Pierre-Luc Beaucage, according to whom the erosion of the large structures that have shaped the industry since the 1980s can only contribute to further diversify an offer that has long suffered from its homogeneity.
“Freeing yourself from the beaten track,” he concludes, “can just be beneficial for humor, for comedians and for the public. What is certain is that there have never been so many different types of humor as there are now. »
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