“You see, this is my life: going on rides and talking about the extreme right.”
We are at the very top of Splash, the ride that has in some way replaced the famous Pitoune at La Ronde, when Mani Soleymanlou says this sentence that sums up the last hour and a half of our conversation in motion. Up and down.
There we are about to dive head first into a big wave. Not easy to take notes, but hard to find better to create an instant connection. We share the same seat belt and the same thrill when you reach the top of the ride, just before starting the steep descent. Ahhhhhhh!
When I asked the 42-year-old playwright, actor and director what summer activity he would like to do while chatting about inspiration, Mani Soleymanlou steered clear of forest walks, mushroom picking and bike rides. He set his sights instead on a visit to the amusement park on Île Sainte-Hélène.
I received the proposal with a smile. If I chose to interview the multidisciplinary creator, it is precisely because his work – especially in the theater – gives me the impression of embarking on a roller coaster of emotions and questions.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Laura-Julie Perreault spoke for two hours with the multidisciplinary artist.
His show Acreated in 2009 and in which he explores his multiple identities and his complicated connection to his home country, Iran, stirred me more than a round of Boomerang when I first saw it.1 Reading of Zeroone of his most recent pieces, which picks up the thread of his reflection on identity, adding the aspect of transmission, turned me upside down.
As he walks toward Le Monstre, the big wooden roller coaster that is emblematic of La Ronde, he explains to me the state of grace that the rides give him. Especially the most extreme ones.
It makes me laugh a lot and I like the relaxation it provides. During a ride, there is an adrenaline rush, I don’t think about anything else except the speed and the fall. Afterwards, I feel very calm and it is a state conducive to creation.
Mani Soleymanlou
Yoga, music, friends, dinners in good company are other activities that allow him to find the right disposition to write, create, think of a show.
An extroverted creator, then? “Yes, it’s true, I need the other, but there comes a time when I need to disappear,” he adds. Travel is then the perfect choice, but Mani Soleymanlou does not go alone. He travels with his family.
With his partner, actress Sophie Cadieux, and his 9-year-old son, he likes to go away for at least a month every summer, even five weeks. When we met, he was returning from more than a month in the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago located 1,000 km off the coast of Lisbon.
“These moments are about finding yourself and rediscovering what’s essential. Not thinking about anything other than being with your son 24 hours a day. It creates a detachment from work, from ideas. There’s a relaxation that sets in, another rhythm. When I come back, I’m fully charged.”
Every time I take a vacation, there is a writing that follows and this distance operates on the ideas. It becomes fertile. My ideas are clearer and I start writing.
Mani Soleymanlou
This fertile energy will also be beneficial to him in the months to come. His dance card is extremely busy. With the author Fanny Britt, he is working on writing the play Classic(s) which will be presented in the spring in Montreal and Ottawa.
In addition to being the artistic director of the French theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where a dozen shows will be presented in the coming year, he will take to the stage at the Centre du théâtre d’aujourd’hui in Montreal for Zaman or the time we hada co-creation with the ever-evolving Valaire group. He will produce two other shows at the same theater. And so on.
Here we are in the Ferris Wheel. Behind us, the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, Parc Jean-Drapeau and downtown Montreal in all its summer splendor. Mani Soleymanlou talks about his sources of inspiration. Among them, there is literature that “forces him to think differently” and the work of others in the theater.
Every time I am in a theatre, I have a moment of inspiration, seeing the artists who commit themselves, the choices that have been made. This communion, this very special space where people sit together. For me, each time, it is a deep inspiration.
Mani Soleymanlou
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Politics is an important source of inspiration for Mani Soleymanlou.
But there is also and above all politics. “I spent the holidays looking at what is happening in the United States, Iran and the Middle East, here and in France, where I was during the legislative elections. All of that is also a source of deep inspiration,” he says.
You can feel it. The words jostle each other and his tone quickens despite the slow movement of the merry-go-round.
What will he draw from politics? “Different points of view! I listen more often to those who annoy me than to those with whom I agree. To equip myself, to better understand what we have to fight against,” he suggests.
I originally created theater because of politics. If politics did not exist in my birth country, Iran, and in my life, there would not have been A nor the pieces that followed. My work is always anchored in politics, in the social, in who we are, in how we are forged and what forges us.
Mani Soleymanlou
“That’s why I do theatre. It allows me to be a mirror of society, a counterweight, a response. It’s humble – it’s still theatre in Montreal, we’re not changing the world – but there’s a political gesture that’s very important to me. All these subjects that should bring us together, but separate us, that inspires me, that nourishes me,” he finishes in one breath as the Ferris Wheel comes to a stop.
After two hours of conversation that also touched on identity, handover and Iranian rice, I leave Mani Soleymanlou in the parking lot of La Ronde, but not before asking him what the name of his theater company, Orange noyée, means.
On the Iranian New Year, which falls on the day of the spring equinox, millions of Iranians in Iran and abroad prepare a table covered with symbols that begin with the letter S in Persian. There is always an orange in the water. “It represents the Earth in the Universe. I drowned the orange,” he says, bursting into laughter. “Everything is in everything.”
1. We can see or re-see Aa play by Mani Soleymanlou, on Tou.tv, in a version reworked in 2021 for television.
Look at the room A
Who is Mani Soleymanlou?
- Born in Tehran in 1982, he was a child when his family left Iran for Paris, then for Toronto.
- A graduate of the University of Ottawa and the National Theatre School of Canada, he has a career in theatre, television and film. He is an actor, director and playwright.
- He has been the artistic director of the French theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa since 2021. He is also the head of his own theatre company, Orange noyée, founded in 2011.
- His triptych on identity, A, Two And Threemade him known in the theatrical world.
- On television, he is part of the cast ofBefore the crash and ofIn Memoriam. In the spring, the film Universal language by Matthew Rankin, in which he plays a role, won the Audience Award at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.