Can theater integrate digital, as it has previously learned to do with video? The sex of the pigeons in any case offers an experience where the cell phone becomes a storytelling tool, rather than a nuisance to be banished. In order to seduce the adolescent public, addicted to small screens, the show encourages access to a social network created specifically.
And for spectators “born before 1995” (ouch!), presumed to be less quick with technology, digital publications also scroll through screens scattered on the walls.
The show, directed by Gabrielle Côté and Laurence Régnier, takes over a Fred-Barry room emptied of all its seats, where the public shares the space with the performers.
Each in its space that defines it — scenography by Marie-Ève Fortier — Billy (Evelyne Laferrière), Derek (Guillaume Gauthier) and the fiery Léo (Alice Dorval, sensitive and vibrant) take the floor successively to reveal their personal concerns. These three contrasting teenagers will come together when their school goes through a crisis, which highlights its problems with unsanitary conditions. Moving from isolation to solidarity, young people discover that unity is strength.
It is with this alert that the room comes alive and the slightly more wandering experience begins. The fall of the curtain comes to separate the protagonists (not that much, since the voice of the interpreters tends to cross these barriers), between whom we are invited to walk. The social network begins to buzz with messages, generators of misunderstandings, but also of a capacity to mobilize.
Faced with the somewhat too banal (but no doubt realistic) content of the publications, we first wondered what the digital dimension really brought. (Not to mention that this scene where all the characters are on their phones is not terribly theatrical…).
But, in the end, it is less their content that counts than this image of a community that the messages end up drawing.
Advocacy felt
Also the result of the meeting of a trio (Frédéric Blanchette, Véronique Côté and Marianne Dansereau), the text succeeds in evoking several themes: intimidation, exclusion, prejudice, body image, but also the decay that we tolerate in schools. And it culminates in a very heartfelt plea. Something like the manifesto of a generation.
The show also seduces by the path it takes through, by slightly transforming its form and the spaces it occupies during the performance. Note a very successful final, with a festive character, played by Sabri Attalah. A conclusion that projects its protagonists into the future – a bit like that of the TV series Six Feet Under —, offering them inventive and touching destinies.