S’ENJAILLER

Sel is an epic for teens that stars a fat princess whose story does not revolve around her weight, but around her quest for a reconciled realm. The story takes place in a decadent and bulimic realm where it’s the custom for people to forget about all their negative emotions by eating until they vomit. Inspired by the Hungarian tale The Princess and the Salt, Sel is a fable that breaks out of storytelling codes and addresses contemporary issues such as body inclusivity, trauma healing, our relationship with food, and the emancipation of a toxic political system, all done with a feminist sensibility, openness, humour and a pop aesthetic that’s inspired by teenage social media networks.

The creation team will collaborate with a drama therapist who specializes in eating disorders among youth. A tour of high schools, along with cultural mediation workshops, is planned for the coming months.

Éléonore Brieuc Biography (Ontario)

Éléonore Brieuc is an author who wears many hats. After earning a DEC in literary creation, she obtained a massage therapy diploma in 2015 and a visual arts certificate in 2018. She then started a law degree in 2020, and the following year began her training in playwriting at the National Theatre School, which she will finish in May 2024. She worked for six years with the Qui Dit Vain theatre collective as a performer, author and co-director. As interested in collective creation as she is in solo writing, Éléonore shines in projects that allow her to express her taste for rebellion, poetry, the visceral, and incongruous worlds.

Anne-Marie St-Louis Biography (Ontario)

Anne-Marie St-Louis is a director who defines herself by her unstoppable passion for the performance arts and community. She is the recipient of the Fonds de recherche du Québec scholarship for her investigation of food and theatricality for her master’s degree at UQAM’s École supérieure de théâtre. She seeks to create more inclusive, friendly and creative directing methodologies. Since 2017, she has co-directed the youth theatre company Créactifs, with which she has produced projects noted for their exploration of unusual theatre spaces, their sparkling and philosophical dramaturgy and their participative elements. She also works in cultural mediation with various partners, including Théâtre Espace Libre, Fusion Jeunesse, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.

YOUTH COMMUNITY WORK

We want to create specialized cultural mediation workshops for students age 5 to 8 at École Ludger-Duvernay, an under-resourced school in the Saint-Henri area. We want to bring two young apprentices, recently trained through the Mentor’art program, into our creation process. The teens in this program are grappling with issues surrounding dropping out of school.

The process

We are currently working to create a youth play called Éva et Porée. We will provide cultural mediation workshops to accompany our work in under-resourced primary schools, where access to art is limited due to a lack of resources. The stage of the work for which we’re applying for the TEC bursary is split into two parts; community engagement will be at the heart of our artistic process.

FIRST PART: Mediation

In collaboration with École Ludger-Duvernay, we want to design, develop and lead cultural mediation workshops with classes and teachers. We will give six workshops in two primary-school classrooms (first and second grade). Our encounters with these children will greatly influence the next steps of our creation and our rapport with audiences. We are very pleased about this upcoming collaboration with École Ludger-Duvernay, because we are very affected by the striking inequalities within the public school system. So it was crucial for us to provide our workshops in an under-resourced school where the children have less access to art than in more privileged schools.

Since we also come from a remote area that doesn’t value culture and from an underprivileged area, we know from experience that art needs to seek out its audience and that awareness-raising is all the more effective when it reaches people at a young age. This is what happened to us, Esther Duplessis (Interprétation, 2020) and myself, Alice Tixidre (Écriture dramatique, 2021), and we made art not only our careers, but our reason to get up in the morning.

SECOND PART: Participation of two apprentices in creating the play

In December 2023, we will undertake a one-week research and creation residency at the performance hall at Patro Villeray and two weeks at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles. We want to bring two teenage interns with us. With training through the Mentor’art organization under their belts, these interns will accompany the members of the creation team. Their technical skills and abilities will be valued and may be put to use in service by our technical, creation and stage directors. We are planning to pay them the same hourly rate as we receive.

These residencies will make it possible for us to create our production. We will design the play with a touring context in mind. The interns will learn the various constraints of this specific context. For example, the various design elements will need to be able to adapt to the range of spaces in which we’ll be performing.

LA MESURE DE NOS ENVIES

Description of the project La mesure de nos envies: writing commission for a creation workshop in the Villeray area.

Théâtre Harpagon is engaged in both creative theatre and the community milieu, among others through their “Théâtre à ciel ouvert” (open-air theatre) project in collaboration with Ville de Laval. For several years, mini-productions have been offered to people who want to have a first theatre experience. For the mini-production of fall 2023, Théâtre Harpagon is inviting an author to create a tailor-made play with and for the participants. The author will be Pierre Berlioux.

Pierre Berlioux (Toronto)

After starting with street theatre, Pierre Berlioux studied the dramatic arts at Conservatoire du Grand Avignon as well as the Théâtre rural d’animation culturelle and at Académie Internationale des Arts du Spectacle. He then turned toward theatre machinery and worked as a set builder and set designer. In 2013, he founded a stage theatre company, Comédie du Fol Espoir, for which he was a coauthor and actor. In parallel, he danced with the company Les Roses du Pavé.

He joined the NTS Écriture dramatique program in 2020, where he wrote Sept stations avant terminus (coaching by Diane Pavlovic and reading directed by Frédéric Dubois), Archéopunk (coaching by Simon Boudreault and directed by Philippe Racine) and L’amour vient du futur (coaching by Olivier Kemeid and directed by Véronique Côté). Throughout his career, he has also written scripts, texts for young audiences and song lyrics.

Leading a too-short existence on a fragile planet lost in an icy universe, he rejoices in knowing that life has no meaning, because he can give it one—which oscillates between politics, poetry and love.

ÉQUINOXE

This project is a continuation of our artistic and political work with the troupe Joussour. It consists of integrating, mixing, and confronting a vision and a Palestinian theatre practice in our dramaturgy. This is first articulated through joint research work, and next through the production of (digital) content, to conclude with the dissemination of this content on a Canadian stage as an epilogue to the creation work.

Hugo Fréjabise Biography (Quebec)

Hugo entered the National Theatre School of Canada thanks to Diane Pavlovic, who had the double audacity to abolish barriers and believe in him. There, Hugo met the game-changing Tamara Nguyen, precious teammate and necessary author.

Hugo is infinitely grateful to his acting colleagues (the 2016–2020 cohort).

Hugo created the Dire, Encore collective in 2018, collaborating with the redoubtable Renaud Dionne, Marine Plasse and Samuel Boucher. He then created the shows Darwin avait raison and En descendant de Babel. Hugo invented the performances #blablabla and On ne fait pas de littérature avec de bons sentiments along with the dazzling Pierre-Alexis Saint-Georges. The remarkable Édith Patenaude directed his play Tu es Nora. With the intrepid Nadine Jaafar and Alice Tixidre, he founded the company Joussour, with which, in 2018, they led the production Ce n’est pas un hasard qui fait de nous des voyageurs avec colis encombrants, a theatre creation project carried out in Beirut with youth from the Ouzai area. Cioran was right: “No need to elaborate works—merely say something that can be murmured in the ear of a drunkard or a dying man.”

Blood Wedding is a creation piece with a deep outreach aspect. Angelica Schwartz and Anais West will start a monthly community outreach initiative with the support of Neworld Theatre with the goal of meeting with local trans and queer artists to seek collaborators. They will connect with a broad scope of queer creatives, not only to build a team for Blood Wedding but to gather various perspectives and strengthen community ties.

Based on this initial outreach, Angelica will create a paid Trans Ambassador program later in the show’s development. The Ambassador program would take after Neworld’s Cultural Ambassador program, bringing together a group of trans artists to consult on the play and help with outreach to their communities. In return, Angelica and Anais will offer them opportunities for theatre mentorship throughout the production. This integral community component will help Angelica strengthen their experience as an aspiring community-engaged director. It will also honour the history of trans stories by providing the opportunity for our modern community to tell their own.

Neworld Theatre will support with outreach and in-kind rehearsal space for the team’s gatherings, and TEC will pay the artists who get involved.

Angelica Schwartz is a director and collective creator born on Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba), where they founded the performing arts company Happy/Accidents. A recent graduate of the Directing program at the National Theatre School, Schwartz is now based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal, Quebec). Drawing on their background in technical production and their passion for storytelling, Schwartz is devoted to creating an authentic connection between performer and spectator. Whether across distances through online platforms or in the intimacy of live theatrical experiences, Schwartz is determined to create a sense of community in our highly digitalized era. Schwartz aims to trouble the public imagination around questions of identity, queerness and bodies. In their work, societal norms and pressures take a backseat to the complexity of the human condition. Schwartz is invested in highlighting the perspective of the Other, giving an alternative lens on how stories can be told.

While at NTS, Schwartz directed The Game: Zoom Expansion Pack, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi and Miss Julie. Artistic mentors include Jackie Maxwell, Eda Holmes, Marcus Youssef, Anita Rochon, Julie Fox, Sarah Garton Stanley, Michael Wheeler, Naomi Campbell, Rose Plotek, and Catherine Bourgeois, among others. Schwartz is a Technical Production graduate of Studio 58 in Vancouver, BC.

Upcoming projects: participation in The Green Rooms of The Cycle – Climate Change, an NAC/FoldA partnership; and Haven, which will be presented at FoldA in June.

Invisible Artists Carnival (IAC) is a free, outdoor, multidisciplinary performance created and performed by an ensemble of outsider circus folk from the mad, disability and queer communities: Yousef Kadoura, Erin Ball and Harri Thomas. Over the course of the show, the performers make various attempts to summon the mysterious Invisible Artist. These attempts vary in form, from clown turns and aerial silks to audience participatory ritual. They ultimately succeed, and the performance culminates in a theatrical carnival of light, music and creative joy. The Invisible Artist is performed by Silvae Mercedes and a rotating ensemble of disability artists recruited from local communities. This ensemble changes with every new iteration of the performance, and in turn changes fundamental aspects of the work, reflecting community members’ own artistic interests and practices.

Harri Thomas is a director, dramaturg and performance-maker based between rural and urban Ontario. They are the founding artistic director of Toronto’s Desiderata Theatre Co. Their previous works as a director have included adaptations of classic texts as well as world play premieres and live art creations. Their work emphasizes the body as the site of both trauma and forgiveness in relationship to love, the earth, the spirit and society. They are a recent graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s directing program. Recent credits include director and dramaturg, One Night (Other HeArts, Caminos 2019); creator and performer, Flower Machine v2: Paiseu (Other HeArts, York Lane Art Collective); and director and dramaturg, MAD ONES (Tangled Art + Disability).