André Brassard, considered a master of contemporary Quebec directing, died Tuesday evening following a long illness. The 76-year-old theater man had been hospitalized for several weeks. The news was confirmed at The Press by long-time friend Alice Ronfard.
Posted at 10:00 p.m.
A cultured and curious artist, André Brassard was a genius in staging. During his great creative period, from the 1960s to the 1990s, he invented a language, an aesthetic and a scenic practice unequaled in Quebec until the arrival of a certain Robert Lepage. An intelligent and brilliant man, with a sometimes brutal frankness, he was a non-conformist artist. It is known, Brassard liked to disobey. In his life as in his art.
André Brassard has influenced generations of designers. Thanks to him (and to Michel Tremblay), Quebec theater has ceased to harbor an inferiority complex in relation to Europe. In the middle, Brassard played the wicked, the rebellious, the rebel, like Jean Genet, his idol.
“It’s not a virtue: it’s because I am, and always have been, incapable of obeying. If I am asked to do such a thing, I must know why, ”he said in an interview with the newspaper. See in 1998, as part of the 30th anniversary of the creation of Sisters-in-Law.
“If there is a closed door, that’s where I’m going to go see,” he confided again, in 2010, to our colleague Alexandre Vigneault. He also spoke of his love-hate relationship with the theatrical milieu: “It’s because we’re in a bullshit milieu and I hate that, bullshit. I will never be elected Miss Canada, I have no reputation to save. »
Art as balm
André Brassard was born in 1946 in Montreal from a “daughter-mother”. A scandal at a time when Quebec was bathed in holy water! To save the honor of the family, the baby is entrusted to an uncle and an aunt. Throughout her childhood, her real mother pretends to be her aunt and never shows her any affection… except when she is alone with her son. With the consequence “a considerable deficit of caresses”, he will confide, adult. “My story is complicated, but I feel like an orphan. To heal the wounds of his childhood, Brassard will find a balm in art… but also in artificial paradises.
As a teenager, Brassard was introduced to the boards at Collège Sainte-Marie. In the seventh year, he staged the first act of Imaginary illness. To achieve this, he calls the star actor of the time, Jean Gascon. The young student wants the advice of the director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. In 1965, at the age of 19, Brassard produced his first (real) production for the amateur troupe Les saltimbanques, with Black Mass. The following year, he founded the Contemporary Movement. He is already riding Genet, The good ones, for his muse and friend Rita Lafontaine. The actress then introduces him to a weakling encountered in amateur theaters, a linotypist who would like to become an author: Michel Tremblay. The rest is history.
PHOTO RENÉ PICARD, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
André Brassard in discussion with actress Denise Filiatraut, during a rehearsal of the play The Sisters-in-Lawin October 1973
In July 1965, Tremblay and Brassard went to see Cain, by Pierre Patry, at the Théâtre St-Denis. And they hate this film from the avant-garde Quebec director. Although they appreciate its realization, the two young men are exasperated by the language spoken on the screen: a cross between Parisianism and French spoken in Quebec; “a Frenchman from the middle of the Atlantic », they quip. The idea of a popular play, in Montreal joual, then germinated in Michel Tremblay’s brain. Three weeks later, the author had a first version of the sisters-in-law in Brassard. But three years will pass before a company, the Rideau Vert, produces the play featuring 15 women.
The Brassard-Tremblay duo
In August 1968, the creation of the piece at the Rideau Vert had the effect of an artistic bomb! A detonation that will be felt for several decades. “I sometimes wondered what I would have become if this work hadn’t been on my path,” wrote Brassard in his preface to Mario Girard’s book, Les Belles-Sœurs: The work that changed everything. “I would probably have directed a small theater and put on a show. But having had in my life an author with whom I wanted to work gave a privileged direction to my journey. »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY CARLE-LAMY PRODUCTIONS
Michel Tremblay and André Brassard at the time of the film Once Upon a Time in the Eastin 1974
The duo will thus reign over Quebec theater for decades, with productions on the chain: Tomorrow morning, Montreal is waiting for me, Hosanna, The Duchess of Langeais, Forever yours, your Marie-Lou, Hello, there, hello, Saint Carmen of the Hand, Albertine in five stages, The real world? For 35 years, he signed ALL the creations of the prolific Tremblay.
In addition to his complicity with the work of Michel Tremblay, the director also staged classics: Euripide, Shakespeare, Racine, Tchekhov, Beckett. In the 1980s, he signed the creation of key pieces by Michel Marc Bouchard, Normand Chaurette and, later, Olivier Choinière.
André Brassard also participated in the founding of the Center du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in 1968. He directed the French Theater of the Center national des arts from 1983 to 1989. For eight years, he piloted the French section of the National Theater School of Canada. In the cinema in the 1970s, he made the cult films Francoise Durocher, waitress, The sun rises late and Once upon a time in the East.
In 1999, his career was brutally interrupted by illness (a stroke). She will stop for good in 2009, at Espace Go, with her staging of Oh good days !, with Andrée Lachapelle, “this gift from God to suffering humanity”, he liked to say about the actress who disappeared in November 2019.
A coming out and a controversy
In the spring of 1972, Brassard went to France with Tremblay. They present their film at the Cannes Film Festival Once Upon a Time in the East. At a press conference, a French journalist asks them a tendentious question: “Why are you attracted to the marginalized? » Brassard’s frank answer: « Probably because we are homosexuals. »
PHOTO ARCHIVES PRESS
movie scene Once Upon a Time in the East (1974), by André Brassard
Back then, no one talked about their sexual orientation in public. The gesture of the two artists seems heroic in the eyes of the pioneers of the LGBTQ + cause. However, his attraction for (too) young men will catch up with Brassard eight years later. In 1975, police searched his home and seized photos of naked boys and young men aged 14 to 20 who were part of a prostitution ring. Brassard was sentenced for gross indecency to 90 days in prison spread over several weekends.
A devastating stroke
In 1999, Brassard suffered a stroke that will nail him to his chair. He retains his whole head, but his physical faculties are greatly diminished. At only 53 years old, he will never be the same man again. “It’s annoying, I have trouble reading, thinking,” he confided to his biographer, Guillaume Corbeil. I think it’s expensive to pay for my youthful follies. I feel like a dead man on borrowed time. If you have to stop living to continue living, it’s not worth it. »
A year after her stroke, she was awarded the Denise-Pelletier prize in recognition of her exceptional contribution to performing arts and Quebec theatre. On receiving his prize from the Government of Quebec, André Brassard, frail in his chair, his voice weak, quavering, quoted Albert Camus: “The only power we have is to prevent, to slow down the destruction of the world. »
In 2004, the director received another tribute prize at the Masques evening. The same year, he confides in Wajdi Mouawad in a book of interviews, I am the bad guy! For Brassard, “the theater remains the only place where humans face other humans with the hope that something could happen,” he told the current director of the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris, who was once his student at the National Theater School.
In his own way, André Brassard was also a godsend to our suffering humanity.