The title already announces a whole program. And We are shining forever looking for the entrance to the realm of the dead does contain these two seemingly antinomic elements, the Grim Reaper and the light. The unusual performance, presented as part of the Phénomena festival, is the third stage adaptation by Christian Lapointe of a work by the author of Seen from here and of literary life. In The deadbook in the form of a diary, Mathieu Arsenault deals with the ghosts of the disappeared who continue to live with us, haunted by that of his great friend, the writer Vickie Gendreau, who died at the age of 24 from cancer.
The show divides the text into three monologues, which energizes the form. On the stage of La Chapelle, Mathieu Arsenault himself takes the floor first, delivering his text at a possessed rhythm, but with mastery. A rather heterogeneous logorrhea where coexist stories of dreams in which his deceased accomplice often appears to him, reminiscences, scenes from everyday life in what is sometimes most futile (including a part of scatology) and reflections. From this emerge some interesting critical considerations on the relationship to deceased persons and to mourning in a society that does not know how to deal with finality — “we are culturally powerless in the face of death”, affirms the author.
Wearing a pink wig, the scintillating Ève Landry then takes over to give voice to a theatrical avatar of the author of Will, with a dazzling presence and a certain ironic charge. Then Mélodie Bujold-Henri, who also played, during the previous solo, an atmospheric musical score on the keyboards, takes over the stage with as much aplomb. The role that this narrator plays in the overall score seems more obscure, but her tone is not exempt from cheerful derision.
The same enigmatic gestures regularly punctuate the trio’s monologues, doubling certain recurring words with movements, as if the performer were crossed by a language or by a compulsion. Understand who can, but this “weird choreography”, and rather hypnotic, adds to the strangeness of the performance.
The opening of the black curtain, after the initial solo, reveals a stage strewn with flowers, wreaths, cardboard coffins — an “installation” by Claudie Gagnon. Decorative elements that refer to the mortuary world, but where the rare accessories used will be used in a playful and theatrical way. In the absence of a realm of the dead, We are shining… in any case crosses the borders of the living spectacle.