André Brassard has just left us. I’m sad. An exceptional theater man. Who I would have liked to know better personally. In fact, I know him better than I think. I was able to appreciate a considerable number of his stagings.
As a teenager, I grew up with Brassard. He was my idol. Armband, the bumfrom the marginal theater of the 1960s. At 15, I already heard about him in the cafés of Montreal’s bohemians.
He made a name for himself in his first staging at Les Saltimbanques, an avant-garde theater company of the time. Brassard founded the Contemporary Movement to better stage plays by Beckett, Arrabal and other contemporary authors that no one dares to produce on professional stages.
I hear his recognizable laugh in the halls. With The sisters-in-lawby Michel Tremblay, Brassard shook up institutional theater at a very young age, which welcomed him with open arms.
I managed to meet Brassard for real during meetings on training when he headed the interpretation section of the National Theater School. I am amazed by his frankness and outspokenness. Despite the prestigious position he occupies, Brassard undertakes a unique approach in our history of theatre.
Of a prodigious culture, bum down to his fingertips, he is in my opinion somewhere alongside the greatest: Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Patrice Chéreau, Jean-Marie Serreau, Jean-Louis Barreault or Ariane Mnouchkine. Of these directors whose career marks their era […],
Brassard is undoubtedly the one that made me dream the most. […] His legacy is priceless.