Public reading has changed in Quebec in the last twenty years. First perceived as a hyper-nested meeting for authors and their intimates, these leaf-in-hand readings are now considered as a form in themselves, a complete spectacle. Over the course of the festivals, public reading has gained its reputation. A look at these show texts, and what they say about our stages.
If the Center for Dramatic Authors (CEAD) has regularly held public readings since 1968, there has been a real seismic wave from this center. Émilie Coulombe, doctoral student at the University of Montreal, speaks of public readings as “a booming phenomenon in Quebec”, particularly since the early 2000s.
Before, public reading was seen above all as a springboard, serving the author if his text is still being written, to help him in his creation. Or to help “sell” it as future production, explains the specialist.
But the arrival of festivals, by “institutionalizing” these readings, according to Mme Coulombe, begins a significant turning point. The International Literature Festival (FIL) has been running since 1994. Jamais Lu started in 2002. The Voix d’Amérique Festival will run from 2002 to 2011. And will be added Zone Homa (2009), Québec en tous lettres (2010), and the still brand new Mots de la Rive (2019), in Rivière-du-Loup.
“In France, they experienced an effervescence of public readings at the beginning of the 20th centurye century”, contextualizes Mme Coulombe, “in reaction to the great reign of directors”. “In Quebec, we do not have the same pattern. We did not have this erasure of the author; there have always been some whose importance we recognized,” like Normand Chaurette or Michel Tremblay.
“But we find this same movement to give back a word that passes through the body, not just for the content but also for its container,” reflects Mme Coulombe. “And so we don’t work on the text in the same way at all. »
The living, sounding, breathing literary
The texts read on stage are not in the same voice. At FIL, we focus on literature. “Everything I present must make people want to read a book afterwards,” recalls founder Michelle Corbeil at the dawn of the 29e edition of the festival.
“It can take several forms,” continues Mme Corbeil, like a cabaret evening where 15 poets come to read. Or like the reading show, such Baldwin, Styron and meby Melikah Abdelmoumen and Jonathan Vartabédian, created in 2021 at FIL and which is still touring this fall.
Or it can be a laboratory, which later becomes another show. As for the correspondences between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, read by Dany Boudreault, which, after FIL 2021, became a show at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in early 2023.
Le Jamais Lu is centered around previously unpublished theater texts. Because “for a theatrical text to be finished, it must be heard,” recalls co-founder Marcelle Dubois. Here we come to “break a text”. “It’s living literature. »
Around 75% of the texts that appear there then become theatrical productions. “That’s not what we’re trying to do, because, for us, reading is a complete form; but we see that it does,” explains Mme Dubois, remembering that in its first edition, we could hear at Jamais Lu Bashir Lazhar, by Evelyne de la Chenelière.
With now four satellites – in Quebec, in Paris, in the Caribbean, and a mobile that wanders around the province – the challenge of Jamais Lu, Marcelle Dubois is aware, is “to remain wild”, to maintain its wasteland spirit .
Reading as well as non-playing
How can we explain this new popularity of public readings? “It ties in with the aesthetic tensions that animate our scenes. There is currently a taste for “authentic speech”,” she says. In the same vein, for example, as documentary theater, the non-acting, the presence of non-actors, the inclusion of direct testimonies.
She continues: “Reading allows us to see the work of the actor, of the reader; to see him at work, to see his breath, to hear the physics of the words, to see how they resonate in space. »
Michelle Corbeil, for her part, calls for the professionalization of readings. The FIL was born from the desire of the Union of Writers of Quebec to produce shows for authors — on stage. She laughs about it: “Sometimes it lasted four hours long. I remember leaning on the console behind the Golden Lion and thinking “My God! Will this end?!” »
“Over time, we have increasingly put the tools of the performing arts at the service of literature. This is what has changed the most. Now, these are actors who come to present projects to me because they have fallen in love with a text, they want to share it, to make it heard without all the artifices of theater. »
To explain Émilie Coulombe: “These readings abound because there is a change in the idea of what the actor’s work is. Before, a good actor was a memory. The spectators were impressed that he memorized so much of the text. Today, the actor can stand on the frontier of performance. And some actors, like Maxime Brillon, tell me that they no longer remember the last time they had to memorize a text. »
The little cassette that leaves
The multidisciplinary creator, who is part of the Tôle collective, corrects: “It’s true that I never again learn a text as I was told to do at theater school. Often, when we learn by heart, we sit in an armchair, the body does not move. And then, when we remember, we have a cassette playing in our head, with its little music, always the same. »
Maxime Brillon believes that the work of memory can change the relationship between text and the body. To the point where Tôle experiments with new ways of learning by heart, by projecting the text on the walls in the rehearsal studio or by copying it onto a type of carpet rolled out throughout the performance.
There has been an increase in reading festivals, notes Émilie Coulombe. And multiplication of readings almost everywhere, but also within the plays themselves.
So, in I like Hydro and in AChristine Beaulieu and Mani Soleymanlou respectively come forward with paper in hand “for a reading scene, as if that brought out more vulnerability,” she illustrates.
The relationship with the body would be, in public reading, more direct. For Marcelle Dubois, there exists “a unique theatrical convention of reading”. “We are not pretending: there is the lectern, the text, and it seems that the transfer of energy then takes place more strongly. It’s like in music, she continues, the difference between live show and the disk. There is a proximity of speech. This creates a rib cage to rib cage effect, it passes through the body. »