One 1ife | In the theater as in video games

Headlining the Osheaga festival next August, Noah Kahan, singer-songwriter and star of TikTok, draws crowds wherever he goes thanks to his catchy indie-folk. Deciphering a phenomenon, just before the artist’s visit to the Bell Center this weekend.

Marc-André Brunet is well aware of this: teenagers sometimes go to the theater reluctantly. Used to giving cultural mediation workshops in secondary schools, he was able to see this while talking with the students.

“They have this perception that the theater is something a bit museum-like, old-fashioned, dusty,” he notes.

Marc-André Brunet and his team at Théâtre Tombé du ciel are, of course, convinced of the opposite. “It can be extremely contemporary. […] We can deal with issues that are similar to them,” maintains the one who is also actor – he was in the cast of 5^e Rank and of Yamaska.

How to demonstrate this to adolescents? “Video games seemed to us to be a very interesting gateway to capture their attention,” says the artistic director of the organization focused on youth theater.

Dive into the virtual

One 1ifewhich will premiere on April 23, features Sam, a 15-year-old teenager who accumulates successes in an online fighting game similar to the very popular Fortnite.

“9736 hours of play without dying: one of the longest sequences ever recorded,” says the character played by Rosalie Daoust, in the first minutes of the piece. Because yes, Sam plays compulsively. She multiplies the missions alongside her friend Ali (Joakim Robillard), an artificial intelligence that she herself created.

On stage, this virtual world is effectively evoked thanks to costumes equipped with light strips, projections on a large screen and omnipresent rhythmic music. Without forgetting the numerous fights, obviously.

“We present the dream aspect of video games in all its splendour,” underlines the 40-year-old director, who admits to having played a lot of Nintendo and PlayStation when he was younger.

If Sam spends so much time behind his screen, it’s in the hope of gaining one of the rare accesses to an application where eternal life is possible. She does not wish to win this privilege for herself, but rather for her dying mother.

Especially since, when you think about it, death is omnipresent in video games, points out the man who did dubbing for some Ubisoft creations. “It’s quite often focused on that. You play a character who has a life and who is potentially going to die. But you don’t want him to die! »

The loss of a loved one is a dark subject, agrees Marc-André Brunet, but it is also essential to talk about it, even to an audience made up of adolescents, he believes. Theater, like cinema or television, is in his eyes a perfect vehicle for tackling more difficult, even taboo, themes.

“Making plays about mourning allows an entire audience to discuss it and prepare themselves to experience these things that we will inevitably experience,” believes the author.

Everyday technology

The play also invites adolescents and their parents to question the place occupied by technology in their daily lives.

“We need to talk about the presence of the virtual in our lives, about artificial intelligence, about the extent to which we no longer live without technology,” thinks Marc-André Brunet.

Through his play, he hopes to encourage young people to develop their critical thinking in the face of these advances which have both good and bad sides.

In One 1ife, the application that Sam wishes to obtain “promises to save the person’s memories, their voice, their appearance,” underlines the author. Does it have the same value as real life? » The question is launched.