Now that the Avignon Theater Festival has just lowered its curtain, it seems appropriate to me to take stock of the situation with regard to Quebec’s most recent presence on the stage of an event emphatically described as ” one of the most important international manifestations of contemporary live performance”.
After being canceled in 2020, the year in which the pandemic played the leading roles, and after a lackluster recovery in 2021, the Festival d’Avignon has managed to return (almost) to “normal” for its edition 2022, which ended on Saturday.
On display this year, nearly 1,600 plays, dance shows, concerts and other artistic performances, including some forty as part of the 76e edition of “In” (the highly subsidized official festival), to which we should of course add the staggering number of 1,540 shows of all kinds presented as part of the 56e edition of the “Off” (the unofficial and independent festival).
No less than seven shows featuring Quebec companies were on the bill at the Off, not to mention that a Canadian production was also featured. However, all these groups, except one, emphasized stage or acrobatic performances. As if by chance, all of them—with the exception, once again, of the one featuring the text of a well-known author—benefited from the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Quebec companies having moreover obtained financial support of the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec, even of the general delegation of Quebec in Paris and of the City of Quebec for some of them.
That the money of Quebec and Canadian taxpayers allows our artists to promote their talents abroad, no one (or almost) will find serious fault. But what upsets me in all this is to note that these public subsidies serve essentially to subsidize… silence!
Zero degree of writing
However, not so long ago, Avignon welcomed This is a no show, a collective creation in which young Quebec actors had the nerve to make it known publicly that the funds made available to the performing arts by public authorities and private partners were simply inadequate, even frankly derisory. It was in 2017.
Since then, at least until this summer, “traditional” theater had regained its rights in the Off. Thus, in 2018, none other than Lorraine Pintal, director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, presented a sober but fresh adaptation of the famous novel by Réjean Ducharme. The swallowing of the swallowed. Even Louise Marleau was then part of the cast: she played the mother of Bérénice Einberg, the main character.
This year, Elisa’s skin, by Carole Fréchette, present in the audience, was also on the bill at Le Off — albeit in a production by Catherine Anne, director of a… Parisian theatre! We should also mention that the Quebec director and actor Christian Bordeleau, who has lived and worked in Paris for twenty years, has repeatedly taken part in the said festival, presenting there three times, in 2012, 2013 and 2015, Yours forever, your Marilouas well as, in 2013 and 2014, It’s your turn Laura Cagodsboth by Michel Tremblay.
Bordeleau had also staged, in 2015, Martian summer, a dramatic comedy by Nathalie Boisvert. Let’s quote again Antiochby Sarah Berthiaume, a drama which establishes a parallel between the revolt, 2500 years ago, of Antigone and “the revolt of a youth who stands up before the absurdities of a world that has become unbreathable”, in a production by the Théâtre Bluff dating back to 2019.
Like the society in which they are immersed, today’s Quebec and Canadian theater artists give the impression, both nationally and internationally, of being short of new ideas, of gesticulating to say nothing for the simple reason that it would no longer have any relevant message to send to our compatriots and to the rest of the planet. Unless she has chosen to shut up for fear, calling a spade a spade, of incurring the wrath of the censors and other self-proclaimed guardians of linguistic orthodoxy that are rampant these days on the Internet and in all spheres of society.
In the era of political correctness and, more particularly, of Wokism, which willingly succumbs to the temptation of totalitarianism, no one apparently dares to run the risk of being expelled from the public domain, for fear of losing their cultural supports, social… and above all financial!
In the era of political correctness and, more particularly, of Wokism, which willingly succumbs to the temptation of totalitarianism, no one apparently dares to run the risk of being expelled from the public domain, for fear of losing their cultural supports, social… and above all financial!
To see in video
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