Since cherry tail, created in the winter of 2016 at the Salle Jean-Claude Germain, Amélie Dallaire pursues a singular, personal work, bordering on the strange and the absurd. In 2019, The crack deployed at La Petite Licorne a disturbing domestic camera, successfully combining laughter and anguish. The third creation by this artist trained in performance, who made her debut in writing with the short form (at the Théâtre Tout court), will inaugurate the reopening of the Théâtre Aux Écuries with Limbo, a word that refers both to the English translation of limbo, to dance and to an eponymous video game. A title revealing the “playful” side of her approach, of a universe that she imagines “like limbo between the absurd and reality”.
Amélie Dallaire announces with a smile that she has prepared notes for the interview, because she feels more comfortable on paper than orally. “My first impulse was to use a feeling of chaos that I feel and to draw material from it to build the form,” she explains. I feel like my thought process is very messy, that I can jump from idea to idea. I wanted to use my rationality to examine this inner chaos, my digressions, and build a show that would adopt the mode of disordered thought. »
Limbo takes the form of a conference: an artist comes to talk about her approach, her new project, in the company of her two acolytes, but they constantly digress. The interactions of the trio, who have an ambiguous relationship, take up a lot of space in the show. “And a mystery hangs over the person who occupied a fourth chair which is there, empty. There are several hypotheses. But to know the end of the story, “you’ll have to come and see the show…”
The playwright is very fond of cultivating the unsaid. “Sometimes I wonder how far to go. In some of the many versions she wrote of the text, things were further named. “But it looks like it made less sense, notes Amélie Dallaire. I worked a lot on measuring, in fact, and leaving space for the viewer. There’s a madness emerging from it, I think, and a lot of weirdness. But it’s very concrete, too: the characters have organized a conference, we see that they are invested in what they do. »
To create this piece using the codes of the conference, the author looked at several examples of this form. “And it’s really interesting, because it’s a serious framework, but it’s always a bit of a mess. Speakers are not necessarily conference experts. So, it gives rise to a lot of technical elements that don’t work, or they can’t find the words…”
She herself suffered the horrors of faulty technology during a creative stage at Zoofest, a “real disaster”. She was exploring PowerPoint, a frequent tool in conferences, and at the premiere, technical problems caused everything to “screw up”. A failure that turned out to be instructive for the author. “It was interesting to live this experience, because I had to work hard to get it to work. On the fourth evening, I felt that I was touching something. »
The piece has evolved a lot since an initial laboratory, under the title The conference, at the ZH Festival in the summer of 2017. “It’s the project I’ve dragged around the most. He really went through a lot. I went to France, Belgium…” Finally, the designer removed all technology from the show, which had become Limbo. And from her technical exploration, she instead wrote a solo titled How I Healed Using PowerPoint — given to the OFFTA —, where a woman who has experienced a depressive episode “discovers her inner nature” thanks to the software…
Humor
Called an existential comedy, Limbo contains a lot of humor. Without being a humorous piece, nuance Amélie Dallaire. The playwright is inspired by the surrealist absurd. “I really like to listen to symbols, to what hovers, to mystery. I want it to come out of the show. I have the impression that humor is what connects me to the human and concrete side, it is what connects me to the spectator. »
And she brought together an “extraordinary” cast, three performers known in particular for their comic skill: Raphaëlle Lalande, member of the playful Project Bocal, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, the actress of like me who was already playing cherry tail, and Olivier Morin, co-director of the Théâtre du Futur, who staged this last play. “They are really creators”, says the author, who sees the actors as writers in their own way: “They write other plots and they offer many other dimensions to my text. “A partition” very difficult to learn “, on the other hand, since the characters do not finish their ideas. “I like to express the trial and error of thought. So sometimes I apologize ”to the performers, admits the author, laughing softly.
Amélie Dallaire wants great precision in form. Signing the staging herself allows the artist to give free rein to her “obsession with small details”. “I wouldn’t say I’m a director. But it’s like an extension of my work, of the process. Because I have the impression of writing while directing. And when I write, I feel like I’m already directing sometimes. »
The artist tries to connect to his intuitive side, to follow his creative impulses without first letting his rational judgment interfere. And after, to include it in a process. “I really like dreams, the mysterious side of life. I think our reason must admit the irrational and the mystery, because it exists. Intuition exists. She tends to explore the unconscious. “That’s why it’s rare for me to write from a theme. For The crack, I was inspired by a sculpture by the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere — a headless couple made of flesh. I wanted to create that image in theater. »
Amélie Dallaire, who is now on her third play, has dug her own niche. And the designer considers herself more capable “of assuming this relationship to the intuitive, the invisible, the fantastic and the imaginary. Now it’s clear to me that it’s a material I use to build my pieces. Limbo, it’s messy, but there’s a lot of work there to get it built. It makes sense to me.” An illustration that chaos can create creation.