For her first theater production, choreographer Mélanie Demers tackles a demanding and abstract text, Declarations by Canadian Jordan Tannahill, two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright and writer, here translated by Fanny Britt.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
The premise is as follows: on the plane, after learning that his mother had an incurable cancer, Jordan Tannahill urgently writes hundreds of sentences, like so many affirmations, manifestations of a life that threatens to disappear into nothingness, invoking pell-mell memories, objects, thoughts, images, culture…
The playwright invites on stage five voices, five characters, who recite their text without having learned it by heart, using a teleprompter, sometimes each in turn, sometimes in tune or in canon. Each affirmation is accompanied by a gesture, spontaneous, desired, different with each performance.
We understand why the artistic director of Prospero, Philippe Cyr, thought of Mélanie Demers to stage Declarations. From the outset, the choreographer has always called for a certain hybridity in her creations, which is difficult to contain within the boundaries of a single discipline. Work of the body, of the voice, manipulation of objects, performative paintings, she juggles with the various materials at her disposal in order to give birth on stage to an art that she wishes to be as lively and authentic as possible, with the challenges that this entails. .
And the material she has here at hand is certainly dizzying, moving, difficult to work with, but also powerful. Declarations is not an easy text to approach. It is filled with rough edges, holes, and it can be difficult to grasp its meaning. The biggest and the smallest, the masterful and the trivial, the political and the intimate rub shoulders there without hierarchy. In the same breath, the characters name the Big Bang and the trace of “brake” in panties, the nostalgia of a childhood memory and the first kiss in the back seat of a car, dawn and the smell of Windex.
PHOTO MAXIME ROBERT-LACHAÎNE, PROVIDED BY PROSPERO THEATER
Mélanie Demers knows how to create living, moving paintings.
Bombarded with these scattered fragments recited with a certain urgency, the spectator can let himself be swallowed up as much as he can be upset. Letting the text flow into you, leaving your intellect aside, seems to be the only way to digest it, chewing it slowly.
Living pictures
With five performers with experience and casting disparate, coming here from the theater (Macha Limonchik, Vlad Alexis, Claudia Chillis-Rivard), there from dance (Marc Boivin, Jacques Poulin-Denis), Mélanie Demers creates on stage (with the help of the scenographer Angélique Willkie) different atmospheres to accompany the modulations of the text.
The theatrical mechanics, as is often the case with Demers, is laid bare, with costume changes on sight and numerous manipulations of objects bringing out, by accumulations and often in an ingenious and surprising way, various visually convincing tableaux.
After the litany of chanted affirmations that open the play, all beginning with “here”—my hand, the dawn, the thing, a blurry photo, an ace of spades—the text becomes rounder, knitted with traces of memories , reminiscences, conversations. The dramatic tension, increasingly palpable, is supported by the enveloping, but also disturbing music of Frannie Holder.
If some passages seemed more laborious on the evening of the premiere – not always easy to be in perfect synchronicity, with a sometimes convoluted score and a ticker – the performers manage at times to reach this vertiginous point of balance where the scene erased to make way for the living, in the present moment, which requires a free abandon that we can only welcome.
What does a body look like? This is the question posed by the author, faced with a materiality rendered evanescent by the shadow of disappearance that rises up in front of him and threatens to swallow everything. What are memories made of when people disappear? What will remain of a body, of a hand whose tangibility seems indisputable, but which tomorrow will be no more, which tomorrow will be dust? These are questions that resonate with us long after we leave the theater.
Declarations
With Vlad Alexis, Marc Boivin, Claudia Chillis-Rivard, Macha Limonchik and Jacques Poulin-Denis
Prospero TheaterUntil November 19