Montérégie talent honored

This text is part of the special section Culture Montérégie

The winners of the 21^e edition of the Montérégie art and culture awards were unveiled on Wednesday.

This cultural event has returned with an improved price list. Four prizes were awarded in partnership with the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Télé Québec and Télévision Rive-Sud (TVRS), rewarding the creativity of artists and organizations in the region. This year, Culture Montérégie also joined forces with the Montérégie Authors’ Association to pay tribute to the literary works of three authors who have distinguished themselves in three worlds: fiction novels, children’s books and poetry. A way to highlight Montérégie’s contribution to the Quebec artistic and cultural scene. “This is great recognition for artists, but also for cultural authors and organizations involved in the interpretation of built or living heritage,” says Nancy Bélanger, Executive Director of Culture Montérégie.

CALQ Award – Artist of the Year in Montérégie (performing arts)

Catherine Major

“I started the classical piano in childhood, and this background allows me to explore different musical styles and artistic registers”, underlines Catherine Major, who signed her fifth album in 2020, Motherboard, inspired by her recent motherhood. For lack of concerts given in front of an audience for two years, she started a tour across Quebec a few months ago, presenting a show that upsets her codes a little: “My old shows were more acoustic, with a piano on stage only, she says. This show is more electro, it contains certain technical prowess and video projections, in particular. It’s a very new universe. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Maxime Audet-Halde, she delivers texts by Jeff Moran that address motherhood, sisterhood, family, love, and more. Although she describes herself first as a composer and musician, Catherine Major is also a director, musical director, arranger and host. This multidisciplinary and prolific artist has received many awards for her original creations.

Télé-Québec Succession Award

Geneviève Cadieux-Langlois (visual arts)

“Getting involved as an artist in my region is very important to me,” says Geneviève Cadieux-Langlois, who is in her early thirties. I want to promote it around public art and thus express my belonging to the territory. This prize highlights the work and approach of this artist who is particularly interested in the artistic exploration of living environments and communities. Through printed art, performances and installations, it contributes to showcasing sites, particularly historical ones, such as the esplanade of the Cultural Center of Chambly. Its installation The public dresser is an interpretation of the socio-economic challenges associated with the Canadian Aluminum Works Company Limited, which occupied the place in the early 20th^e century and which supported the working community before abruptly closing its doors. “This work carries the fallen dreams of working-class families,” explains the artist, whose next artistic project could lead him to work with a community center for teenagers.

Heritage award

The Boucherville Chronicles: The Archeology Series

The four episodes of these chronicles, published more than a year earlier, aimed to make known the heritage of Boucherville, the vacation site, the islands, the cemetery of boats. The Arts and Culture Department of the City of Boucherville has added four other episodes that explore the occupation of the territory since its beginnings, in the company of historian Myriam Wojcik. This immersive podcast invites you to discover the remains of ancestral homes—that of Louis-Hyppolyte La Fontaine, in particular—the traces of old boardwalks and artefacts that testify to the human presence; from aboriginals to early settlers. “We chose the podcast tool rather than the interpretation panels so as not to harm the integrity of the landscape in a heritage context,” explains Catherine Lavallée, museologist and manager at the City of Boucherville. The podcast series is available for download on Google Podcast and Apple Podcast.

The Théâtrophone, from L’Arrière-Scène

It was created last year to bring youth theater to schools when the health crisis deprived children of cultural outings. Le Théâtrophone is an audio platform created by L’Arrière-Scène, in Beloeil, in partnership with the Maison Théâtre and the company Les Gros Becs. “The pandemic and the digital shift accelerated this project, but it was already in my head long before,” says Jean-François Guilbault, artistic director of L’Arrière-Scène. A year later, the project has never been so ambitious and has established itself as a mediation tool between distributors (theaters, community halls, cultural centres, etc.) and teachers, with an asserted educational mission. Because the audio catalog, which will have 24 pieces by the end of the year, also comes with complete sheets on the theme, tone and vocabulary to serve as a basis for school work. And teachers are offered cultural mediation workshops to train them in transferring the concepts covered in plays and demystifying dramatic texts. This pedagogical tool, which is part of the transversality, is a link between culture and education and intends to become the cultural component of the Quebec school training program. “We have development projects in the coming years in Quebec, but also in the Canadian Francophonie,” adds Jean-François Guilbault.

A horse coldby Pierrette Dubé

“On Monday, Bucephalus, King Godfrey’s horse, sneezed. Nothing to worry about, of course! But, soon, His Majesty imitated him, then the whole court imitated him in turn. So begins the latest album by this prolific author in children’s literature, who has a number of books to her credit. Is this horse cold a metaphorical transposition of the COVID-19 pandemic? “Strangely, no,” said Pierrette Dubé. I wrote this book a year before the health crisis and it ended up coming out last year. Premonitory or not, the story of this virus which spreads throughout the kingdom ends up becoming a formidable foil in the face of the onslaught of invaders. “Children’s literature brings great freedom on the narrative level,” explains the author. It allows a lot of fantasy and humor. A humor carried by the earthy words of Pierrette Dubé, but also by the powerful illustrations of Enzo (Enzo Lord Mariano), in an explosion of movements. The album is aimed at children from 5 to 10 years old.

green as hellby Isabelle Gregoire

The title refers to how the convicts named the Amazon jungle. It is this inhospitable ecosystem that serves as the setting for the third novel by this author and travel journalist, who draws her romantic universes from her reports. This thriller psychology puts into perspective two eras (the 1980s and the 2010s), two places (Guyana and Quebec) and two heroines whose voices respond alternately throughout the plot. “The noir novel, a genre that I really like, allows me to develop a detective story while raising societal issues,” explains Isabelle Grégoire. I address, in particular, the themes of the transgenerational quest for identity, domestic violence and the question of the confinement of women. Over the course of the story, nature, in perpetual regeneration, ends up becoming a character in its own right, hostile and sprawling, in which humans reveal their animality. “Just like in my last novel, the theme of nature looms large,” she says. This has a great power over self-understanding. »

Winter paintings, summer paintingsby Jean-Marc Desgent

The six stories that make up this collection of poetry are inspired by ancient tradition, with texts written in verse, and docu-poetry (Documentary Poetry), and tell historical facts by integrating personal considerations. “These stories are true, like that of the Sioux Sitting Bull or that of the massacre of rats in the Saint-Henri district, says Jean-Marc Desgent, artist who has won many awards for his global work. Even if these poetic texts were written at different periods, they all belong to this genre which mixes authenticity and subjectivity and they have the same rhythm. A rhythm that the poet chisels by reading his texts aloud and returning to the rhyme to arrive at his final version.

This content was produced by the Special Publications team of the Duty, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of Duty did not take part.

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