THE WORDS MATTER MOST IN UNDERSTANDING ARCAN
With an eye to the 375th celebrations, the annual mustering of cutting-edge international performance known as Festival Trans-Amériques began on Thursday with 100% Montreal, a tribute to the city and its people, and continued Friday with Pôle sud, a piece of documentary theatre focusing on the Centre-Sud neighbourhood. (Both shows can still be seen over the weekend.)
What promises to be one of the standout shows of the festival, a reprise of La fureur de ce que je pense, or The Fury of My Thoughts (June 3-6, Usine C), focuses on a true Montreal icon: the late novelist Nelly Arcan.
Actually, Arcan was born in Lac-Mégantic. (Its library, rebuilt after the devastating 2013 rail disaster, was named in her honour.) But it’s the nature of Arcan’s work and public image when she moved to the city that made her an international literary sensation. And for director Marie Brassard, that’s a problematic part of the Arcan myth.
“She has been a very mediatized character, and I think it wasn’t for a good reason,” Brassard says over the phone. “It was for the sensational aspect of her personality, and about her looks, and the fact that she wrote in her first book, Putain, that she had been working as an escort.”
Brassard’s show, which was first seen at Espace Go in 2013 and features an extraordinary cast of six Montreal actresses (including Sophie Cadieux, Julie Le Breton and Evelyne de la Chenelière), visually addresses this latter aspect of Arcan’s life by staging it in a complex of rooms that immediately trigger associations with Amsterdam sex workers exhibiting themselves behind windows. Brassard also likens the image to Barbie doll boxes with their see-through covers.
Brassard, however, says she’s more interested in focusing on “the depth and quality of her writing” than on amplifying “that Nelly Arcan ‘character’ that everybody is talking about.”
The actors, plus one dancer, embody aspects of Arcan’s writing — mostly from her novels Putain and Folie, and her collection of essays Burqa de chair — rather than attempt a bio-drama of her life, as the recent film Nelly sought to do.
Long seen as an artistic associate of Robert Lepage, Brassard formed her own company, Infrarouge, after the success of her FTA show Jimmy in 2001. Although it’s easy to identify stylistic parallels with Lepage in her work, Brassard identifies one key difference: her preoccupation with sound, compared to Lepage’s preoccupation with image.
“It’s become my signature, I suppose,” says Brassard. “I really wanted to do something musical with this show. Nelly Arcan’s writing is very rhythmic, as if we hear her talking at very fast speed. This is something that moves me a lot, because you can hear despair and sadness and disappointment in her life. I wanted to transform that into songs.”
Lest you start thinking Brassard has created Nelly Arcan: The Musical, she’s quick to point out that this “song” quality “has more to do with the music and rhythm of the way the actresses are performing.”
Arcan’s troubled life, anguished writing and tragic death — she committed suicide in 2009 — can’t help but make for emotionally challenging theatre. But Brassard is keen to emphasize a perhaps lesserknown quality in her subject’s writing.
“Although it’s very dark literature, I like to point out that there’s a lot of light hidden in it,” Brassard says. “She seemed to be funny in life. I think the fact that she was so despairing and disappointed was because she was aiming at this sort of ideal about what life could be. She was searching for that and never found it.”
Another major FTA show playing next weekend is the fourhour-plus Wycinka Holzfällen, or Woodcutters, from Krystian Lupa — one of Poland’s, indeed Europe’s, most renowned directors. Adapted from a typically misanthropic 1984 novel by late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (this is the 10th time Lupa has adapted Bernhard’s work), it largely consists of a rancorous soiree during which a group of Viennese artists awaits the arrival of a great actor fresh from performing Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.
In emails to the Gazette, Lupa describes how, partly as a result of improvisation among the 13-strong cast, the adaptation works on several levels.
There’s the narrator’s hostile view of his fellow artists as he broods in the corner, their inflated opinion of themselves, and the perspective of two young men of letters described by Bernhard as “the two giggling idiots.”
If you think this sounds like an evening of bracing bitterness, you might be right. Bernhard’s novel was banned in Austria because members of the Viennese art set were mortified to see such unflattering portraits of themselves in print.
But in its own backhanded way, Woodcutters also promises to be a celebration of the intense life and work ethic of artistic elites.
As Lupa writes in one of his emails: “Artists cultivate conflict in themselves for the sake of their craft, which often brings them closer to the frontier of mental illness, of neurosis.”
Next week sees the launch of FTA’s offshoot festival, OFFTA, in which both established and emerging Montreal performers are offered the space and resources to create new experimental works. OFFTA runs from Tuesday through June 8. Visit offta.com.