CANDRAMA and a Question

[Alastair M. Wallis Jarvis]

>I am curious as to who (or what theatres) you have in mind, Alastair,
>when you refer  to English language practitioners who take Quebecois
>theatre as their model/inspiration and what elements of Quebecois
>practice and work they draw on. I, for example, like (and try to do the
>same whenever

Look, I am thinking of myself and about three other young directors who
have  been doing work here in Halifax over the past four years. I think
perhaps I am the only one who professes such a strong connection
with and attraction to the sort of work Lepage is doing, though I see
similar sorts of investigations going on with my colleagues here. I think
that David Kennedy has in his work with Milkman Theatre shown his
interest in developing an aestehtic for the incorporation of many media
into the communicative process and an interest in moving beyond the more
established conceptions of realism and narrative structure. Jamie Lindsay
in his work both as a director and a playwright has also sought to push
the boundaries of the intelligeable. Alex MacLean is another young
director of whom I was thinking, but at the moment his investigations
are directed more towards the tradition 'begun' by Grotowski as mediated
through Richard Fowler and the members of Primus Theatre.

        I may be misrepresenting their work in an apalling fashion, but
these are some of the people I had in mind in my original post. I think
there is a sense however naive or founded on half-truths that there is a
stronger avant-garde in Quebec, that there is more acceptance of a more
aesthetic or post-aesthetic form of theatre in the  arena of
French-canadian theatre, whereas, the theatre of English Canada is more
overtly 'political / politicized'. I put those terms in scare quotes,
because I realize someone is saying that 'aesthetic' or 'post-aesthetic'
art is political.

        Perhaps these relfections come as a result of a severely limited
experience of the breadth and scope of Canadian theatre, both within and
outside of Quebec - in fact I know they do. But, to my mind, it is a
fortunate person indeed, with much money and travel time who can claim a
comprehensive knowledge of the Canadian theatre. Seeing everything in
Toronto simply doesn't cut it. Even the theatre critic of Canada's
"national newspaper" has only this year been down to review more
than one of the theatre companies on the east coast. Granted, though,
living (broke) in Halifax, certainly doesn't cut it either.

        If I can return to Lepage's theatre for a second, I think that
what Peter Wollen has to say in his essay "The semiology of the cinema"
(In  Signs and  Meaning in the Cinema) of the work in the
of Jean-Luc Godard can be applied equally to the work of Lepage in
the theatre (making the appropriate adjustments from film references to
theatre). Wollen writes: Godard

        is unafraid to mix Hollywood with Kant and Hegel,
        Eisenstainian montage with Rossellinian Realism,
        words with images, professinal actors with historical people,
        Lumire with Melies, the documentary with the iconographic.
        More than anybody else Godard has realised the fantastic
        possibilities of the cinema as a medium of communication and
        expression. In his hands, as in Pierce's perfect sign,
        the cinema has become an almost equal amalgam of the symbolic,
        the iconic and the indexical. His films have conceptual meaning,
        pictoral beauty and documentary truth.


        Lepage has stated again and again that the advent of photography
giving painting the freedom to explore the surreal and the expressionistic
is mirrored in the freedom that has been granted theatre in the
development of movies. I don't very often see this freedom being taken
advantage of as fully or to such effect as in the work of Lepage and (I
think it important to note) the company with which he works. It is for
this reason that I look to his work in particular as paradigmatic.

Poke away...!



Alastair