Theater man Serge Marois, specializing in theater for children and young people, died on December 2. Director, co-founder of the drama center for children and young people L’Arrière Scène, in Beloeil, created in 1976, Mr. Marois has also authored more than forty plays.
“The importance of Serge Marois is that he was one of the first to decentralize youth theater in Quebec, to get it out of the islands of Montreal and Quebec City,” said the retired colleague from To have to Michel Bélair, specialist in theater for young audiences.
“When he started, there really weren’t many people who believed in youth theatre. In 1967, when he was only 19 years old, Serge Marois founded the company L’Arabesque, one of the first in Quebec to focus specifically on young audiences. De L’Arabesque, with Stéphane and Marie-Andrée Leclerc, Mr. Marois, created L’Arrière Scène.
It was in a café-theatre, Le Pont Tournant, that the first programs unfolded. In 1982, the company moved to the Cultural Center of Beloeil. L’Arrière Scène is the first producer-broadcaster specializing in theater for young audiences in Quebec.
L’Arrière Scène hosts plays on tour, from Quebec or abroad, and allows local artists to venture into youth theatre. In 1993, Wajdi Mouawad, in residence, came to create his Alphonse. In 2001, Mouawad returned as an author, signing pacamambowhich will tour a lot, and which will give L’Arrière Scène its first Masque prize the following year.
In 2007, the author and actor Simon Boulerice joins Serge Marois and the company for the first time, on the play Stanislas Walter LeGrand. There will be many other collaborations, while Mr. Boulerice signs the texts or plays in the plays. Simon Boulerice will also be considered for a long time as the natural dolphin of Serge Marois, the one who should take the reins of the company, before being caught up in his career as an author and communicator.
Memories of youth and family
A prolific author, Serge Marois has written more than forty dramatic texts, favoring the theater of images. Michel Bélair, a long-time theater critic for young audiences, particularly remembers Mr. Marois’ very first texts, then his Family Trilogy, “when he himself plunged back into his childhood memories”.
This Trilogy, he started it in 2009 with My mother’s dress in 2009 (directed by Sylviane Fortuny), a play in which opera was linked. The criticism of To have to said at the time that it was Marois’ finest piece, an “ode to siblings against a background of devotion to the mother”, “a luminous text of intelligence and subtlety. »
The series continued with My father’s hands (2014, directed by Denis Lavalou), on absent fathers. My sister (directed by Jean-François Guilbault), presented in world premiere a month ago, concluded the cycle by addressing family bereavement.
We hear Marianne, the little sister of three and a half years dead for forty years. “Before I was born, she says, I traveled through the wombs of all the women in the world. I could have been born in a country of sand and sea, in a country where men kill each other, in a country where children are afraid and hungry. I was here in the center of the world, in the place before all births and I was expecting a father. He would come from a huge country, a rich country where children eat and go to school. »
Jean-François Guilbault took over the artistic direction of L’Arrière Scène for the 2020-2021 season. He ensures the continuation, as well as the general co-management with Pascale Correïa.