For its first visit to the Festival TransAmériques, the Outaouais company L’eau du bain offers a double. An invitation hoped for for a “certain number of years” by the co-founder of the theater created in 2008, Anne-Marie Ouellet. Delighted, the author and director believes that White Out, a work addressing “all the senses of the spectators”, is likely to interest festival-goers. “It almost acts like a dance performance, I feel: very sensory and with plenty of room for the audience’s imagination. »
And the presentation of The children’s room, a rare foray by the FTA into children’s theatre, potentially makes it possible to explore the experience of the diptych. “In the visual arts, we are used to seeing two works that respond to each other, differently. Here, it’s the same thing: there are thematic echoes, motifs that we see again from one show to another. »
Presented last year at the Carrefour international de théâtre in Quebec, White Out emanates in particular from the desire of the “Durassian” Ouellet to work on The sickness of death, the “immountable” novel by Marguerite Duras, but which has often attracted the stage. “His writing is so open that by trying to represent him, you immediately make choices and close doors. In the end, we clung to two things in this novel: the place, a hotel room by the sea, winter, and the moment when the male character returns there and realizes that the woman has disappeared. And because she is no longer there, he understands that he loved her. White Out starts from this moment when we notice the loss of the other, whether by death or by the departure of the loved one. This relationship with the trace of the disappeared. If it was developed from personal bereavements, from a “very sensitive and emotional zone” with Anne-Marie Ouellet, the piece allows the spectators to pour out their own losses there. “It’s an atmospheric show in which there is a very thin narrative thread, so that everyone can project their story. »
The fruit of a long search, the shows of L’eau du bain are set up as a trio, with lighting designer Nancy Bussières and sound designer Thomas Sinou. The three have worked together since the very beginning of the collective. “The text is written with the designers,” explains Ouellet. Me, I can work a little outside the set to write versions. But it really builds when we’re together. We jam all three: sometimes Nancy tests the lights and me, it gives me an idea. I sit in the light to write a dialogue, Thomas sends sound…”
For White Out“the light really took over the leader “. She is so “powerful” that often the words written by Ouellet were no longer necessary to tell what she was already expressing. Nancy Bussières was inspired by her “fascination for the artist James Turrell, who creates light installations aimed at making people lose their bearings”. The creators set themselves this challenge: to produce a whiteout, this feeling of disorientation caused by a blizzard, so that the spectator loses his own bearings. The show opens with a sensory storm, which symbolizes these episodes where the beacons of our life collapse. “The outside represents this emptiness [intérieur] in which one can fall, whether as a result of bereavement or professional exhaustion. When all that we had built no longer holds, all of a sudden”, illustrates Anne-Marie Ouellet.
Seven minutes during which the public receives a “big slap, is shaken from the inside” in order to bring it into another state of listening. Attracted by theatrical forms that “provide destabilizing sensations”, Anne-Marie Ouellet calls this approach shaking up the “body of the city”, that is to say, ridding the spectator of his daily life concerns. “We shake to be able to remove what is parasitic and renew the desire to hear, to see. And light is designed to make us hallucinate. There are things that we think we see, but which are not there for real. Nancy really works for the viewer to feel her vision: do they really see what they see? So he feels watching, in a way. »
In short, to speak in modern terms, we reinitialize the senses of the public in order to make them available to what comes…
Spontaneity of children
The woman played by Anne-Marie Ouellet is first alone in an empty room. Then children appear and “come to resow life in space. Are they part of my dreams, my hallucinations? Is it me little who comes to watch over me big? There are several stories like this that are offered without being affirmed. One could say that they are figures rather than characters. »
The creators had so much fun collaborating with the young performers that the desire was born to create a show “with them, for them, in order to go further in the work and for this space to become theirs”. There where The children’s room joined White Out, it is by exhibiting a room “invaded by the exterior landscape, where one strolls between dream and awakening, where dreams come to life, materialize. But these are of a totally different nature, because in The children’s room, we are in the imagination of seven children who have fun with what they have on hand. A playground supported and amplified by sound and light.
Aimed at ages 6 to 11 when it premiered at the National Arts Center — but “adults are going to have a lot of fun seeing it too” — the piece was built from workshops and games with the cast ( including the eldest of the director). “And even in performance, the text is not quite precisely written. They have parts of improvisation in their text, in their movements, so that it remains spontaneous. So that we are really voyeurs of a room inhabited by seven children”, explains the designer.
Conducting children, which she was exploring for the first time, forced Ouellet to develop a way of speaking to them, to deepen their relationship, so that these inexperienced performers remained children throughout the process, instead of “becoming good little actors. Because as soon as I have the impression that they reproduce what I want, for me life dies. I want to keep the game, the pleasure.
Bathwater has been interested in working with non-actors from the start. Hence previous shows with teenagers (Impatience) and the elderly (Here we areincluding colleague Christian Saint-Pierre praised the “strong signature” when presented to Factory C). It is then a question of “magnifying the presence of a person rather than bringing it into a character. To listen to others very early in the process — people I wouldn’t necessarily meet ordinarily. I feel like I’m writing them more of a subtext that will feed them. And where they can appear with their richness, their different colors. »
And what Anne-Marie Ouellet adores first and foremost is that a theatrical project constitutes for non-professionals “the experience of a lifetime”. “It’s not their job. And me, I feel like that: when I arrive at the theater, I play my life. I really don’t want to distort the work of actors, because I love directing actors too. But the joy, the naivety of the children and their discoveries! »