In the memory of a regular Avignon spectator, this is a record. Ten Quebec shows are presented this year in different theaters as part of the Off Avignon. At the corner of a street, on a small display stand, the festival-goer grabs the small catalog in typically Quebec blue colors in which the Quebec Delegation in Paris has gathered information about them. This small, very simple notebook is also a first: never before has Quebec taken the means to collectively promote our productions. Our shows always arrive at the festival in a jumble, according to the personal initiative of the artists and their ability to pay the imposing fees, and are scattered without coherence in the programming of more than 1,500 shows of the Off. If the small blue catalog does not yet constitute a real pooling of forces through the action of a Quebec organization on site, it is a start.
“Since the mid-2000s, our shows have been anticipated and received with ever-increasing enthusiasm, and really beyond big names like Robert Lepage or Marie Chouinard,” assures Marie-Andrée Gougeon, responsible for market development for DLD, a company founded by choreographer Daniel Léveillé and now directed by Frédérick Gravel.
High priestess of the international diffusion of Quebec dance, she is almost the only one to practice this profession full-time, which she has been doing for more than 20 years. She knows everyone in the live performance networks in Europe — it’s the heart of the matter — and we come across her all year long from Paris to Berlin via Brussels, sometimes accompanying the troupe of choreographer Catherine Gaudet, sometimes the productions of Frédérick Gravel, sometimes the new incarnation of the piece Love, Acid and Nutsby Daniel Léveillé. When she says that “Quebecers have had a consistently good reputation and good press for 15 years,” we take her at her word. Few people are able to see this on the ground with such acuity.
Full houses for Dufresne and Gravel
In Avignon this summer, nothing to make her lie. The buzz is undeniable around the two shows accompanied by Marie-Andrée Gougeon: Discontent in Civilizationby Étienne Lepage and Alix Dufresne, and Everything’s going to hell, honeyby Frédérick Gravel. At La Patinoire, one of the rooms of the La Manufacture theater, Alix Dufresne’s show is warmly received. The third week of performances is well underway when The duty sits in the front row and notices a full house, who have come to witness the impromptu invasion of a theatre stage by four clumsy bystanders. The reactions are just as lively at the Hivernales, the same day, a few hours later, in front of the falsely virile folk-rock choreographies of Frédérick Gravel and his new band of performers of Everything’s going to hell, honey.
The next day, at 11:20 a.m., at the Théâtre du Train Bleu, actress and author Amélie Dallaire also enjoyed great success with her offbeat conference. Limbo. As Everything’s going to hell, honeywhich is presented at the Hivernales thanks to significant financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) (and even under a three-year agreement to broadcast Quebec shows), Limbo is hosted at the Train bleu thanks to a strategic development grant that saved Amélie Dallaire from having to pay out of pocket the 15,000 euros (nearly 22,450 Canadian dollars) it costs to book a time slot in an Off Avignon theatre. The CALQ, once more or less quick to grant these sums to Quebec artists so that they could perform in Avignon, seems increasingly aware of the role the festival plays in promoting European tours for our artists.
“We can’t do without Europe if we want our shows to have a long life and reach a wide audience,” says Marie-Andrée Gougeon. “In Quebec, we create a considerable quantity of works without having a strong enough distribution network on our own territory—or even on the scale of North America—for these works to circulate and be seen. France is a must. And I may be old-fashioned, but I remain deeply attached to our connection with our French cousins. I was born into a family that overvalued attachment to the mother country. I think it’s still important to value this connection, even if the world is more complex and Quebecers have many other influences at the same time.”
But, to strengthen ties, “Quebec must better promote and fund self-employed workers who would like to get into the profession of international broadcast manager,” adds the 2019 winner of the Prix de la danse de Montréal in the Cultural Manager category. “If I have managed to do this job full-time for the past 20 years, it is only because I am lucky enough to be an employee at DLD. However, dance and theatre companies that can afford to pay such a position are very rare. We cannot leave the responsibility of developing the profession solely to these small artistic companies.”
A vision for Quebec in Avignon
Many of our live performance community dream of Quebec having a real programming structure in Avignon in the OFF, a sort of festival within the festival, led by a broadcast team that would be given the means to match its ambitions. The Swiss have also invented the perfect model to replicate in recent years, according to Marie-Andrée Gougeon.
And it seems that we may not be so far away. Having multiplied the “exploration missions” on the ground for two or three years, with different partners, the CALQ seems to be preparing something.
“If I had a message to send him,” concludes Marie-Andrée Gougeon, “it would be to remain attentive to what French and European programmers come here looking for. We must resist the temptation to build a structure that would only value the notion of equity in its programming choices. By coming to play in Avignon, we want to seduce the directors of European institutional theatres who are looking for avant-garde, singularity, strong themes, flexible and inventive forms. It is very different from Edinburgh, where, for example, circus and comedy are popular. It is not by checking all the boxes of equity between disciplines – circus, comedy, text theatre, puppets, young audiences, etc. – that we necessarily spot the gems. We must think about it differently, outside of these silos.”