(1:14) Courville» is a theater piece by Robert Lepage and Ex Machina.
Courville recalls an ordinary reality: the Quebec suburbs of the 1970s and their now obsolete bungalows. And, by extension, the concerns of the time. The Cold War, which finds an outlet in exciting hockey tournaments between Canada and Soviet Russia. The sometimes trippy pop of progressive rock. The eternal national psychodrama in which French and English speakers clash, and which will soon be exacerbated. And the beginning of the end of what is called, at that time, the “nuclear family”, this sociological bubble where the mirages of consumption sometimes hide sordid relationships.
On November 15, 1975, Simon is 17 years old, has his own room in the basement of a pavilion in Courville, a widowed mother mixed up with a shifty uncle, an involuntary and painfully permanent tattoo on his chest, a female friend who woos him without much success and a male friend who is as clueless as he is athletic. The coming year will precipitate things, the social unrest that is gradually taking place will find dramatic and decisive echoes in the life of the young man.
Courville sketches the portrait of a complex adolescence, where the backdrop of collective euphoria cannot occult the torments of sexual awakening, the weight of the look of others or the obsession of appearances. Throughout the show, the ancestral technique of bunraku is used to bring life to puppets of all sizes that embody Simon and his entourage. On stage, Olivier Normand is the narrator of the story.
(2:03) Frame by Frame, by Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté.
(1:28) 887 is a journey into the realm of memory. The idea for this project originated from the childhood memories of Robert Lepage; years later, he plunges into the depths of his memory and questions the relevance of certain recollections. In this era of digital storage, mountains of data and virtual memory, how is theatre, an art based on the act of remembering, still relevant today?
In a story somewhere between a theatre performance and a conference, Robert Lepage reveals the suffering of an actor who—by definition, or to survive—must remember not only his text, but also his past, as well as the historical and social reality that has shaped his identity.
(2:43) From its most primitive expression; a baby’s cry – to its most sophisticated; opera singing – the human voice is a select locus of identity and emotion. Lipsynch explores its many manifestations, declensions and implications through different procedures that convey and reproduce it.
Telephone, radio, sound tracks and silent films, playback and postsynchronization: singing voices, synthesized voices, voices of the conscience, voices of blood relatives, voices from beyond, hallucinated voices. Nine stories unfold in nine hours, focussing on nine protagonists whose lives answer, relay and echo each other.
As in The Dragon Trilogy and The Seven Branches of the Ota River, the singularity of individual destinies is superimposed on the magnitude of collective history, forming a gigantic modern fresco in the image of our modern world, fragmented and plural, burlesque and tragic, and layered with multiple languages, sounds and meanings.
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