Can Everything Just End?
Martin Faucher’s final year as artistic director of Festival TransAmériques
“It was quite rude to cancel all the programming we had worked on for the 2020 edition of the festival,” Martin Faucher, artistic director of Montreal's Festival TransAmériques (FTA), tells me on a Zoom call. “I was quite proud of the program because it was so relevant. Many shows examined the end, the end of everything.” Faucher had programmed works including Jordan Tannahill’s Declarations, which was inspired by his experience of confronting his mother’s mortality, and Marie Brassard’s Violence, billed as an exploration of “the threats of mankind and of nature.” These performances were amongst the 23 theatre and dance productions scheduled to take place during the 2020 festival that were cancelled, a fate almost all live performance around the world experienced because of the pandemic. Only in retrospect, after everything did end in a way mid-March last year, can Faucher assess how presciently relevant that 2020 festival really was.
Faucher is a leader in Montreal’s theatre and dance scene. Before becoming the artistic director of Festival TransAmériques in 2014, he was working as an artistic consultant with the festival for eight years. Before that, he was the artistic director of Daniel Léveillé Danse from 1994 to 2014 and the president of the Conseil québécois du théâtre from 2005 to 2009.
Cancelling a festival mere months before opening is difficult enough for any artistic director, but this turn of events was particularly upsetting for Faucher. The 2020 festival was his second-last as artistic director. On Sept. 10th, 2020, he announced that he is stepping down after the 2021 edition, scheduled for May 26th through June 10th. “It’s huge. I have spent fifteen years of my life with this festival. I know that it is the end of a cycle for me anyway, pandemic or not. It has been strange and sad to end this way,” he says.
After grieving the loss of the 2020 edition, Faucher has embraced his final festival and how different it will be. He feels fortunate during these times of crisis to have something artistic to occupy himself with, which helps him “avoid an apocalyptic frame of mind,” he says. “How do I keep moving forward? How do I manage the restrictions of this situation? How can I make something artistic under these conditions?”
After Faucher’s tenure as artistic director ends, the festival will continue under the co-direction of Martine Dennewald and Jessie Mill, responding to current affairs and global issues as it has done in the past. “There is a new life for the festival because we have to deal with new artistic realities,” Faucher says. “We have to be relevant to society. For the past five years, we have been a part of a big revolution, with #MeToo movement, with Black Lives Matter, and post-colonial thinking, and thinking with the land, with diversity, with inclusion. … All these big movements have to be reflected in FTA.” Faucher believes that the movements driving social change before COVID-19 will continue in the coming years. If the appointment of two women to lead the festival is any indication, Festival TransAmériques will continue to address relevant social issues, such as equity and representation in artistic leadership.
In addition to the cultural revolutions that have dominated news cycles for several years, the festival has also had to reckon with digital technologies that are now instrumental to modern life. Although Faucher acknowledges that nice images can be created onscreen, he thinks that a lot can be lost. “We lose intimacy,” he says. “Performance onscreen offers a false intimacy. Real intimacy is when you are in danger with someone. To be onstage, to be in a room with others, to be in public, to be in an audience … It’s dangerous.” Faucher tells me that the mystery of live performance is also lost: “The way we look, the way we hear, when we see live performance is so rich. There are many ways to experience live performance. But with digital performance, the ways we can hear and see is totally different. Everything is set.”
But is going digital all bad? “It is not the way of the future. It is a way, not the way. I’ve heard so often since the spring that digital is the new way of the future. But it is not the only way,” he says. However, one
Performance onscreen offers a false intimacy. Real intimacy is when you are in danger with someone.
– MARTIN FAUCHER –
aspect of the digital festival has impressed him: podcasts.
Instead of cancelling the live conversations scheduled during the festival, Faucher made them into podcasts. “We reached a lot of new audiences with them. The level of the conversations was much more sophisticated than if it happened live. … It showed me that audiences are starving for conversations about art and ideas, and they are ready to live with those words and ideas. For me, it was a success. There is an appetite for something deep,” he says.
The pandemic has prompted Faucher to ask many questions, not just about the festival but about art, performance and life more broadly. And like all crises, the pandemic has taught Faucher about living in the world. “This crisis has taught us how to stay humble, to take care of the land, to take care of each other, especially those in hospitals and those who are older,” he says. These lessons have also provided Faucher some insight about his work in live performance: “The way you enter a rehearsal room or the way you enter into a theatre, you are always humble because something bigger than one person will happen. This crisis has taught me this and that everything is ephemeral. Anything can stop. The shows can stop.” However, even after so much was brought to an end this past year, Faucher is still looking ahead. He believes that despite how it may seem, everything, in fact, does not just end.
Stephen Low is an independent journalist and scholar who lives and works in Toronto.