This text is part of the special Theater booklet
As part of World Theater Day, Rébecca Déraspe, playwright and author of several plays performed and translated around the world, signs the Message québécois du théâtre, whose writing is entrusted each year to a personality from the milieu.
It’s not for nothing that since VIand century BC citizens gather somewhere to experience things together. I don’t know if Daphnis and Tullia were gossiping while smoking cigarettes before entering the agora. I don’t know if the Epidaurus theater had a cancellation policy or an invitation list for premieres. And I don’t even know if the Dionysies Champêtres had a photogenic artistic director to represent the guideline of the festival.
But what I do know is that something had to be lived that way. Daphnis pis Tullia needed to come together in relative silence to get dramaturgy in the plexus. I don’t know about you, but I love living my catharsis with others. Worse, what I like even more is the exaltation of a crowd that gets up after having breathed in quintet. Is that the magic of theatre? To breathe together the pangs of our humanities?
The power of an ovation is like a prayer sent to the future.
So.
It’s World Theater Day. His party. Or anyway. I don’t know if I should talk about the elephant in the pandemic. I don’t know what to do with these two years that have damaged my colleagues, my friends, my precious, my precious. But today, I choose the sound of a written ovation.
Gotta do it for real
Putting one’s face in the world with a benevolence that one does not invent just for the image of the one and the one who does “the right thing”
I want us to tie cynicism to an electric pole and douse it with acid
Worse after
Watch it melt sharing something of our vulnerability
We must love each other
Theater people and people inside the theaters
Worse, we should also reach out to people who stay outside theaters
Give them the financial means
Make them want
Without behaving like “Those who Know”
All shapes must
that the realists
Than baroque tragedies
Than the burst boulevards
Than docu-fiction
Than docu-not-fiction
That the poetics
That the minimalists
That the solos
That the “shadow”
That the “of the image”
that the stories
That young audiences
May all forms find a place in our theaters
Than young voices and new ones
Be treated with admiring respect
May established voices continue to be heard too
To build together by learning yesterday or dreaming tomorrow
Than other voices
Those of what is diverse
Those who carry another narrative
Those who point out the privileges that denounce the dominations
Those who attempt reconciliation
These voices must
explode
Must learn to hear
shortness of breath
Reach out to those and those of tomorrow
To those worse those of yesterday
make a chain
A large a solid something like a net
a social
To protect our gains and our really not acquired
A thread of meaning
To keep us from sinking
In a consensus that would lead us to the death of thought
A net full of all the breaths
A net so important so inspiring so strong so brilliant
So that the politicians worse than the politicians see us
Brilliant udders in solidarity
In the heart of the city