FTA GIVES MONTREAL A STARRING ROLE
Theatre/dance festival takes the pulse of the city on its 375th anniversary while importing top talent
The 11th edition of Festival Trans-Amériques, which opens next Thursday, will, as usual, pull in cutting-edge performance from all over the world. But the Montreal component that is always a part of the festival will take centre stage this year, in recognition of the city’s 375th anniversary.
Most prominently, the epic show 100% Montréal (Théâtre Jean-Duceppe of Place des Arts, May 25 to 28), which features a 100-strong cast of citizen-performers, will kick off the festival. This will be followed by another documentary-style scrutiny of the city, Pôle sud (Espace Libre, May 26 to 28), in which actress Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and film director Émile Proulx-Cloutier create a portrait of lives lived in the neighbourhood between the Radio-Canada/CBC tower and the Gay Village.
Yet another theatrical mapping of Montreal will wrap up the festival: Jusqu’où te mènera Montréal? (Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts, June 7 and 8) is a “touristically incorrect” cabaret in which a diverse group of Montreal writers will offer their own dispatches from the streets.
This last show, which was partly created during the Jamais Lu festival that ended last week, is directed by Martin Faucher, artistic director of FTA since 2014. As he explained to the Montreal Gazette from the
festival offices on Ste-Catherine St.: “Each author spent one hour with the audience at Jamais Lu to talk about their experience, and after that I collected all the writings and put them together in a collage which actors will perform with musicians.
“I wouldn’t feel very comfortable presenting a show of mine in the festival,” he added. “But I don’t consider it my own work. It’s a collective project.”
And while we’re on the subject of warding off any suspicion of conflicts of interest, let me here fully disclose the participation of my children in 100% Montréal, the selection process of which began with just one participant, who was then given 24 hours to recruit the next, and so on until a cross-sectional century was reached. This round-robin herding method eventually found its way to my kids’ school, and the two of them are, at the time of writing, nervously awaiting the rehearsal process to begin a week before opening.
100% Montréal, which is described as a “collective X-ray of the city,” is the latest piece from multi-award-winning, Berlinbased documentary theatre specialists Rimini Protokoll. It will see 100 of our citizens gathered on a circular stage (echoed by a circular projection screen), telling stories about their lives and answering questions ranging from the heavily political to the seemingly banal. Potentially embarrassing personal questions are asked in the dark, with the eerie glow of cellphone lights indicating “oui” or “non.” (Although mostly in French, the show will be surtitled in English.) The non-actor ensemble will be put through its physical and organizational paces by the directing team of Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel.
The format for 100% Montréal will be pretty much the same as for 100% Berlin or 100% Penang — indeed, all of the many cities that have received Rimini Protokoll’s “living statistics” treatment. The difference, of course, lies in the geographical specifics of each cast. (Another local element of the show is that live music will be provided by Montreal-based indie outfit Navet Confit, which also supplied music for Talisman Theatre’s Yukonstyle last year.)
Faucher, who caught 100% Brussels and 100% London, recalled: “In Belgium, the show was presented two weeks before a big election. It was much more political than the one I saw in London, which was a lot more about, let’s say, intimacy.” (Faucher saw 100% London in 2012, long before the divisive shock of Brexit.)
“In Brussels, people seemed much more closed (to one another),” Faucher continued. “There seemed to be a lot of tension. They also have a very strange sense of humour. Here in Montreal, we have a lot of differences, but we have space to breathe. I think it will be a bit more joyful.”
He paused for a moment before adding: “We’ll see.” (To which I can only add: “Kids … smile!”)
Perhaps we’ll get a blend of that “strange” Belgian sense of humour and Montreal joie de vivre in Exhibition — L’exhibition (Monument-National, June 2 to 5), which sees Brussels-born Benoît Gob collaborating with Montrealers Francis La Haye and Emmanuel Schwartz to create a thought-extracting machine, with blackly comic results. Another Montreal-based show is La fureur de ce que je pense (Usine C, June 3 to 6), in which a remarkable cast including Sophie Cadieux, Christine Beaulieu, Julie Le Breton and Evelyne de la Chenelière explores the provocative writings of the late Nelly Arcan under the direction of Marie Brassard. And from Quebec City comes another quirky comedy about out-ofcontrol makeshift machinery, Entrez, nous sommes ouverts (Espace Libre, June 1 to 3).
Provincial pleasures aside, one of the festival’s main raisons d’être, of course, is to import the best in world performance.
International heavyweights this year include Tokyo’s Toshiki Okada with Time’s Journey Through a Room (Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, May 29 to 31) and Barcelona’s El Conde de Torrefiel with La posibilidad que desaparece frente al paisaje (Possibilities That Disappear Before a Landscape; Théâtre JeanDuceppe, June 5 and 6). Switzerland is represented by the quirky Conférence de choses, a series of absurdist lectures taking place starting May 29 at various educational institutions, winding up as a six-hour compendium in the auditorium of the Grande Bibliothèque on June 4.
One of the most prestigious shows this year — and perhaps, at over 4 ½ hours, the most challenging — is Woodcutters (Théâtre Jean-Duceppe, June 2 and 3), from legendary Polish director Krystian Lupa. It’s an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s sardonic novel, which takes potshots at Vienna’s artistic elite. It also revolves around a performance of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.
Another show drawing on classic drama is Antoine et Cléopâtre (Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts, May 27 to 29), an intimate take on Shakespeare’s play, as well as on the notoriously overblown Liz Taylor/Richard Burton movie. The production is directed by Portugal’s Tiago Rodrigues; his show By Heart, which riffed on a Shakespeare sonnet, played in FTA’s 2015 edition.
This two-way engagement between the classics and contemporary experimentation is, for Faucher, a crucial part of the festival.
“I think it’s important to stay related to the past,” he explained. “Not to a sterile past or a museum past. That’s why it was important for me to invite Tartuffe (from Berlin’s Schaubühne) in 2015. It was about totalitarianism and fascism, but in a totally different way from the way Tartuffe is usually produced in Montreal. Also, Blank Placard Dance (a dance/performance piece that will wind its way around the city on May 26 and 27) is a work that was created in San Francisco in 1967, but now it’s been remixed. So it’s about the past, but totally rooted in Montreal in our era. It’s a rich dialogue between past, present and future.”