When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Quebec in March 2020, the artistic director of the Festival des arts de Saint-Sauveur, Guillaume Côté, quickly understood the impacts, both negative and positive, that could result. Of course, the travel of international artists was stopped. But there was a retention of Quebec artists rooted in the country.
Result? With the complicity of maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Côté quickly modified the programming of the 29e edition of the event dedicated to music and dance. Ten musicians are paired with ten Quebec choreographers to perform ten short solos inspired by the crisis. A solo is posted online every Sunday, from July 5 to September 6, 2020.
Instead of being cancelled, the event reinvented itself to be presented online, the book says. Culture in Quebec during the pandemic.
The impact of COVID-19 has not always produced such happy results, but it must be recognized that cultural stakeholders have adapted, found new avenues, and shown initiative. For the benefit of their artisans, but also of the approximately 8.5 million Quebecers confined to their homes, lacking direction.
At the Interuniversity Research Center on Literature and Culture in Quebec (CRILCQ), we also understood that researchers had a role to play in this situation, namely to document the collective memory of the cultural community in the face of the pandemic. Which led to this work.
It may be said that this is yet another kid’s license “financed with our taxes.” But the fact remains that this scholarly book has its place perfectly in understanding history in progress.
We say “learned book”, which implies that there are, yes, dry passages, even very dry ones that will appeal to a limited audience. From the outset, an introduction of about forty pages, including five of bibliography, is not the idea of the century to charm the general public.
Rest assured, other sections are very accessible, even captivating.
Thus, the chapter devoted to the Quebec circus, a sector “vulnerable to economic upheavals”, but where social networks have constituted a positive vector (yes indeed!) to reach people, as we read in the extract below.
It is in this chapter that we find the very eloquent photo, signed Antoine Carabinier-Lépine, illustrating the cover. Art (here, the circus) is encapsulated by the pandemic and forces the rare spectators to observe the creators in an airy space, the street.
Another captivating chapter is the one devoted to television, “which benefited the most from the situation,” according to its author Pierre Barrette. The latter looked, among other things, at the press conferences of the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, where it was necessary to “bring the cacophony of ambient speeches back to a clear line of argument.”
Barrette is also interested in the changes made to the show’s format Everyone is talking about it (TLMEP) which, while they may have seemed like a “circumstantial cosmetic adaptation,” constituted a “major transformation of the concept.” In fact, Barrette says, the crisis has brought TLMEP back to its initial role as an agora, lost to theinfotainment over the years.
The book is divided into four sections: inventory and research, create, disseminate and subsist. While the first segment explains the researchers’ approach, the other three delve into the actions and reactions of the players in the field. Those fond of statistics will find what they are looking for in several analyses and tables. One figure among others: in a survey of 31 emerging musical artists (between 20 and 35 years old who want to make their art their profession), 57.1% of respondents said that the first wave of the pandemic had a positive effect on their creativity. But this effect was reduced to 33% in the second wave.
So it was about time it ended.
Extract
“From then on, social networks play an essential role in reminding circus artists how united and supportive they are. The first living room performances (kitchen, balcony) are shared on Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo. We compete in inventiveness. Montages of video extracts are proposed based on the feats of isolated artists who meet through editing (sic). There is a desire for exteriorization, like a din, which manifests itself in reaction to confinement…”
Who are Hervé Guay, Louis Patrick Leroux and Sandria P. Bouliane?
Hervé Guay is director of the Department of Letters and Social Communication at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, where he teaches theater. Mr. Leroux is rector of Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Mme Bouliane teaches musicology at the Faculty of Music at Laval University. All three are researchers at CRILCQ.
Culture in Quebec during the pandemic
The University of Montreal Press
440 pages