For fifteen years, choreographer Mélanie Demers has been flirting with theatre, or at the very least taking pleasure in exploring the formidable power that words can have when they are skilfully combined with movement (and vice versa). The artistic director of Prospero, Philippe Cyr, had the brilliant idea of placing on the designer’s path a score that fits her like a glove: Declarationsa text by Jordan Tannahill which saw the light of day at the Canadian Stage in Toronto in 2018, was read by its author at La Chapelle in 2021 on the occasion of the FTA, and is here vigorously translated by Fanny Britt.
Born in Ottawa in 1988, Jordan Tannahill is a less and less well-kept Anglo-Canadian secret. We owe him, among other things Liminal (La Peuplade, 2019), a novel that colleague Anne-Frédérique Hébert-Dolbec described as a “prodigious odyssey” testing “the limits of reason and materiality”. We could use the same words to define Declarations, an autobiographical piece (in the richest sense of the word) that arose from its author the moment he learned that his mother had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. Addressed to the latter, but also to lovers, to society and to the times, the verses snap and their accumulation composes a breathtaking declaration of love and hate, a surge of joy and anger.
Poetics and kinetics
To give materiality to a fleeting world, reality to things and feelings, to relationships and events, the author tirelessly names what surrounds him, the serious as well as the trivial. “Here’s how to fill the hours of the day / Here’s a song that reminds me of you / Here’s a song whose lyrics are forgotten / Here’s an oral tradition / Here’s oral love / Here’s an ovation / Here’s a group of people who look up at the sky. Then he finds a form of appeasement in memory, a consolation in the contemplation of the many traces left in us by beings who have been cruelly stolen from us.
Defended by five performers of great agility — Macha Limonchik, Vlad Alexis, Marc Boivin, Claudia Chillis-Rivard and Jacques Poulin-Denis — the piece is poetic as well as kinetic, it explores the musicality of language and that of the body. , it appeals to chorality while relying on singularity, it puts precision at the service of spontaneity, even improvisation. Impressionist, never explicit, never linear, sometimes downright abstract, but above all very evocative, the experience requires a certain abandon.
At the height of the score, the show cleverly blurs the senses, embraces the queer character of the work. Despite the numerous scenic instructions written in black and white by the author, you can feel Mélanie Demers’ unique signature everywhere on the set. In a kitsch environment conducive to reminiscences, on a large thick carpet where objects from the past accumulate, the five protagonists, who are so many contradictory aspects and yet united by the same psyche, perform in embroidered lingerie poignant rituals, baroque ceremonies on which it is allowed to project our own desires, our own mourning, our own thirst for deliverance.