Among the youth theater proposals this season, Marie-Eve Huot, artistic director of Le Carrousel, boldly and hopefully explores the universe of six young people who reveal the depths and complexity of adolescence. After two years of pandemic, the body and the word are freed to finally bring out the light.
In 2020, Marie-Ève Huot is caught up in the statistical figures which reveal that the leading cause of death among young Canadians aged 10 and over is suicide. “It upset me. And I was obsessed with it,” she says over the phone. At the same time, she walked around the classrooms, led workshops, questioned young people about loneliness and felt more than ever a very strong feeling of isolation. “Young people were caught in a vice. They knew we had to be careful, but at the same time, they needed to be together more than ever in this turmoil we were going through. […] I thought I had to do something […]. The desire to write on the subject led Mme Huot near the Bronx theater in Brussels where he was offered to work with the choreographer Zoe Demoustier, who was, surprisingly, pondering the same questions. Together, they collected the testimonies of many young people telling how they lived their adolescence.
Therefore choir beating was born. A brand new project, a UFO will say Marie-Ève Huot, in the course of the Carrousel and in her own. “What is wonderful and also dizzying with this project is that we are not in conventional theater as we know it in Quebec. First, it is not the text that is at the heart of the proposal, but the body of the actors. Of six teenage actors. The show answers this question that we asked ourselves: what does it mean to be 15 years old, 16 years old, 17 years old in 2022? In a choreography imagined by Zoë Demoustier, directed on stage by Marie-Gabrielle Ménard, the amateur actors vibrate, react, sway to the rhythm of a soundtrack made from all the excerpts from interviews with young people. “We shattered the glass ceiling of the theater for young audiences and we invite teenagers to an experience that resembles them. We’re not even in the mirror theater anymore, we’re almost in real life […]. It’s a creative process completely different from any I’ve gone through so far, which puts the voice and the body of young people in the spotlight. They are the ones who are really the star, ”says, thrilled, Marie-Ève Huot.
Bringing hope to life
Very first project that she chooses as unique artistic director at Le Carrousel, choir beating translates a desire of the house to open up, to think differently, without of course abandoning the baggage that is the strength of this theater founded by Suzanne Lebeau and Gervais Gaudreault. “Suzanne and Gervais gave me everything, transmitted to me a package of values that I carry and that I will carry for a very, very long time. A vision, a way of entering the work, a rigor of thought and a duty of consideration for what the child is, his place in society […] But me, now, I have the responsibility to be a woman of my time […] in which we can no longer do the theater as we used to. Subjects can no longer be treated in the same way. »
Addressing the many difficulties that adolescents have to face and their lucidity vis-à-vis these realities, Huot underlines the importance of highlighting more than ever the links between humans. Experience choir beatingprecisely translates this desire “to be with the other […] to learn from each other […] And therein lies, I think, the hope and also our ability to think critically. […] ‘Cause when you criticize […] it’s that you ask questions and you say you can change things. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean, but that drop counts. There it is, our duty of hope. To tell them that they can make things change, as long as they engage with their body, with their heart, with their head and with their mind,” concludes Marie-Ève Huot with hope.