OLIVIER DUCAS
La Pire Espèce is taking you on a trip to 28 cities in one night. The Quebec company’s Cities is a one-man show that has co-artistic director Olivier Ducas on stage telling stories of imaginary cities while building them out of surprising materials. At first glance, it’s rapid urban exploration, but at its core, Cities explores human relations. Ducas sat down with Swerve Going Out editor Jon Roe to talk about the upcoming Calgary shows.
This will be the first performance of the English translation. Was there dialogue that proved difficult to translate?
A lot of them. My writing is—how can I say that?—few words for a lot of meanings. The way the show is written, I’m on stage and I’m some kind of producer or guide, in a way, into these cities made of objects. I’d say the writing is a dialogue between the words and the images. At some point, the words must say just enough but not too much.
How’d you decide which materials you wanted to use in the construction of these various cities?
Each city had its own creative process, but most of them arrived from intuition—I know there’s a city in these objects, but how can I put it together? There’s a city where I’m making a coffee. I have sugar cubes and I have the coffee grains. I know there’s this contrast between these two objects. I knew I wanted to make clear the contrast in the people of the city.
One of your goals was to try to make something that wasn’t traditional theatre. Why did you want to go in that direction?
Since I got out of school in 1999, we (Ducas and co-creator Julie Vallée-Léger) tried different things with objects. Puppeteering with objects is one part of our work. We worked with different aspects of objects to find that there’s a huge strength and meaning with objects in theatre. This is so powerful, that you can write to make the meanings emerge.
One of the inspirations for this was the Italian novel Invisible Cities. Why did you want to build off that?
What I loved about it is every description is very, very short. It’s just like a half page, one page max. And it’s this idea that the author, Italo Calvino, is talking to us, about people, but taking it from the side, not directly. And he would talk about some philosophy and some sociology but always just describing a city. It’s not brutal, in a way. I loved this approach.
Do you expect audiences to identify their own city in the different cities you’re showing them?
I think the spectator is entering into some kind of dialogue. It’s a little bit like when you go to see visual arts. You have to dialogue with the painting at some point because it’s in front of you but it’s not speaking. Well, it’s saying things, but you have to confront it. I think the people live the show a little bit the same way. When I speak to people after the show, they say, I love this one, or I love this one more. I think every city has a lover in some way.
Cities: Wednesday, May 4 to Thursday, May 7 at Theatre Junction Grand, 608 1st St. S.W. 8 p.m.; matinee Saturday, 2 p.m. $27 - $45. 403-205-2922, theatrejunction.com.