Arielle De Garie’s favorite role when she was a teenager? “It was Cyrano de Bergerac,” she says without hesitation, her eyes once again injected with the intensity of her youth. “I connected so much with the fact that he had a difference that prevented him from feeling free in love. »
But at 41, the actress has long since emerged from the shadow of the character with a nose shaped like a rock, a peak, a cape, a peninsula. In her early 20s, she recalls, she felt “like she was outgrowing Cyrano.” “I had moved away from myself the fear of being rejected because of my difference or, in any case, I experienced it much less often. »
PHOTO STÉPHANE BOURGEOIS, PROVIDED BY TRIDENT
Arielle De Garie in Pride and Prejudice
On the stage of the Trident in Quebec, for two weeks, Arielle De Garie has not been donning a musketeer’s hat, but rather the lace dress of Mrs Bennet, the mother impatient to marry her daughtersPride and Prejudicetheatrical adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel.
A character who, in his original text, does not move around using a wheelchair. This is the case for Arielle De Garie, who has lived with arthrogryposis since birth and who, from high school, proclaimed her ambition to get on stage, only to be told each time that there would never be role for her.
In the interlude, the mother of two children wrote her own roles, invented a career by putting on her own shows, in addition to becoming a pastry chef. But in 2022, because dreams only fall asleep and never really die, she participated in the open auditions of Trident, where director Marie-Hélène Gendreau would come and ask her: “But where did you come from, You ? »
“The challenge before was always that we felt the need to explain why the character I played was in this condition,” she laments. Which is not the case for his Mrs Bennet, who gets around using a wheelchair without anyone explaining why. It’s up to the viewer to imagine it, or not.
I’m just living a character and just that, it’s immense, it’s magnificent.
Arielle De Garie
Better: the staging makes no effort to try to camouflage this handicap. “Sometimes I worried about the pace,” says Arielle. When I have to transfer myself from a bed to a chair, it takes me time and what Marie-Hélène told me is that I show something that we are not used to and that in itself , it’s beautiful. »
Questioning its legitimacy
Arielle De Garie not only plays her first major role in the theater, but also becomes one of the first actresses with disabilities in Quebec to play a role in a repertory play. Which did not come without questioning about its legitimacy.
Was she hired for her talent or because in 2024, a company like Trident must open its doors to all forms of diversity? “It’s a shadow that is always on the table for disabled artists,” she confides, “and that the entire team did everything to evacuate. »
PHOTO EDOUARD PLANTE-FRÉCHETTE, LA PRESS
Arielle De Garie is one of the first actresses with disabilities in Quebec to play a role in a repertory play.
As my career was strewn with many rejections, and because I was the one leading my projects, I was not always able to assess my talent. But quickly, the director and the artistic director [Olivier Arteau] told me: “It’s you we want, for your talent, we don’t have a box to check.”
Arielle De Garie
As talented as she is, her participation in such a play would simply have been impossible before last fall, when there was still no, behind the scenes of the rehearsal room occupied by the Trident at the Grand Quebec Theater, toilets adapted for disabled people. Which is no small detail, as anyone with a bladder knows.
The question of the representation of disabled people seems to have long remained in the blind spot of the cultural world’s awareness around the vast subject of diversity. “But there,” she said, “I feel that the doors are finally opening, even if they are not yet wide open. »
Show multiple
For many years, Arielle De Garie felt the obligation to put on the mask of the superheroine, deploying a wealth of effort in order to prove that she was capable of everything, everything, everything, a grueling theater which will undoubtedly be familiar to many people with disabilities.
I did eight times more than others just to feel like I was worth the same as everyone else, until I burned out. But now, I am celebrating it, telling myself that I am so much more beautiful, bright, interesting thanks to my disability.
Arielle De Garie
What is she dreaming of? “I dream of performing and being seen for all that I am, which means, yes, a person who lives with a disability, but also everything else. And that’s where, I think, it starts to change: I’m no longer just one thing in the eyes of others. I am multiple. And I want to continue to show this multiple. »
Pride and Prejudice is presented until March 30 at Trident
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