Speech delivered on stage in Salle Ludger-Duvernay at Monument-National, March 21, 2025

A multifaceted career 

It is difficult to advocate for one’s own works. In my opinion, works speak for themselves and, over time, become the DNA of a creator. 

But let’s rewind. I directed my first show at the age of 8 or 10, involving friends, neighborhood neighbors, and parents of friends in the production. 

The garden of my family’s house became the performance venue for the occasion. My father would bring out the speakers, my mother chips and drinks, and everyone brought their chairs. In short, what I remember from this anecdote is the desire to bring people together and create. The idea of making a career out of it never crossed my mind; it was more an expression of nature, a need. 

When I was a teenager, I traded creation for sports, which helped structure me and taught me perseverance—a quality that later proved essential in my career as an actor and director. 

At the conservatory, the academic curriculum was very traditional. At the time, I felt I was in a process that was distant and non-creative. 

But, in reality, I was there to absorb, albeit unwillingly, the fundamentals. Even though sometimes I found it boring, it gave me everything I needed to invent a new language years later in my own work. 

I was fortunate after leaving the Conservatory to tour internationally in Australia, Europe, the United States, South America, and Africa. I also worked for six months on a barge converted into a theater in London, where we performed Shakespeare’s repertoire using string puppets. After this experience, I decided to found a theater company called Transthéâtre to provide a platform for both myself and other creators who shared the same desire to create. 

The economic and cultural context of my early professional years in 1990 was marred by the post-referendum economic and political crisis in Quebec. To put it into context, there were no daily TV shows at the time, nor specialized channels, there were very few Quebec-produced films, and theater was facing an identity crisis. Furthermore, for women directors, we were a minority. 

However, the previous decades, the 70s and 80s, had been flourishing. Theater companies founded during this period had generated international recognition and encouraged the growth of creation in Quebec. These companies were an inspiration for my generation. Unfortunately, the young companies founded in the 90s, including mine, and the artists working with them had to make do with scraps due to the economic context, which saw public funding for culture diminish significantly. It seems that history is repeating itself… To cope with this situation, we created our shows in non-theatrical spaces and used public space as our stage. Challenging the audience differently and inventing new modes of production and promotion—more rebellious, less conventional—became our undisciplined signature. 

In this suffocating context in Quebec, it was almost a necessity to found companies to exist as an artist and make our work known, which we later called “creator companies” to describe this period. 

I don’t express this situation with defeatism; it reflects a sociocultural reality that must not be overlooked, as it shaped the course of my journey. And despite this crisis, nothing could break my creative momentum. These years were crucial, as they laid the foundation for what I have become today. I wouldn’t be able to carry out the projects I’m offered now without the experience I gained through my company, which served as my testing ground, my creative territory. This company, without which the ideas would never have materialized, is still today my well of renewed encounters with the public and what defines me as an artist. 

However, I’ve noticed that artists over the past 20 years have been increasingly fragile and forced to “deliver the goods,” meaning they must provide immediate proof of their legitimacy. On top of this precariousness, there is the difficulty of finding partners whose choices aren’t solely dictated by economic constraints. 

If we observe that no risks are taken by those who should be promoting singular works, it’s probably because the selection criteria are of a different nature than those of the “objective” search for singularity. 

I chose to challenge the audience without resorting to provocation. I chose to be undisciplined. Through contemporary creations, I explore the contradictions and drift of the West. 

The hybridization of elements is my obsession in creating new narrative forms. Since 1991, I have focused on immersive scenography for my creations. I used a multidisciplinary approach involving designers from various artistic fields such as dance, live music, cinema, visual arts, and multimedia. Breaking the fourth wall became an obsession, as did immersing the audience in a sensory experience. In this constant search, I used different elements like surround and ambisonic sound design. 

I used video projections on multiple screens, with images designed to give the audience the feeling of a waking dream. I realize that my imaginative mind doesn’t always reconcile with the concrete world I live in. Therefore, I use projections and new technologies as a poetic, dreamlike, and abstract language, close to an irrational world where my imagination finds itself, in dialogue with a script delivered by actors or a musical performance, in a tangible form on stage to find balance. 

The absence of a traditional Italian stage for the show Until we die, and the direct accessibility to the set destabilize the audience and engage them in a different form of contact—a participatory and active form, favored by tactile, sound, and visual sensations. 

This kind of project shakes up our usual ways of working but provides a fascinating exploration of the mechanisms of narrative construction in an immersive space. For me, this is where the sensory adventure and the purpose of immersive theater lie. Sound spatialization and lighting subtly guide the viewer’s gaze. At times, the audience must choose between two scenes unfolding in parallel. They choose their position in the space, providing either proximity to the action or distance that allows for a wide shot. The audience is both a witness and an actor by their mere presence. 

As I began integrating musicians on stage in my shows, my musician friends asked me to direct their concerts. It started with Beast, then Valaire, Karkwa, Louis-Jean Cormier, Patrick Watson, and many others. I also had to design the sets for most of these concerts. In some cases, I explored projections using new technologies. 
 

The place of women in my creations 

Since graduating from the Conservatory, I have condemned the underrepresentation of women on stage, in cinema, and in directing. It was a man’s world. I tackled the clichés that confined women to traditional roles, the stereotypes that limit us and keep us in the private sphere, as though we were incapable of telling anything else. 

From 1991 to today, women have been at the center of my creations. 
 

In 2009, a close friend, a great choreographer from Montreal acclaimed in Europe for his subversive and innovative works, asked me to accompany him during his waiting process for a lung transplant. I decided to turn my camera onto the daily life of a man waiting for the doctor’s call for a transplant… a waiting room between life and death. It became a personal diary that accepts neither taboos nor destiny. 

The film was released in 2011 at the closing of the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, was on the list of immortals at MoMA in New York, and was shown at HotDocs in Toronto, Raindance Festival in London, Sidney, Hamburg, Munich, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Helsinki, and Copenhagen. This film is about our desire for immortality, the dignity of the human body and spirit. 

In this film, I brought together and united my passions for dramaturgy, scriptwriting, editing, directing, and stage direction. I also produced the film myself with a grant from CALQ and a Prim grant that allowed me to rent equipment for filming, a montage room, and a sound studio, along with a personal loan from the bank to cover all postproduction costs. I don’t regret doing it because the opportunity to make my first film was unique. This documentary feature project was a human and artistic adventure. 

I became the viewpoint of the audience in the intimacy of an extreme situation. 

After the film, and after his surgery, we decided to create a duo called What’s Next. United by art and friendship, we created a space in which creativity appears as a vital act.  
 

Conclusion 

I have a career that could be described as singular, multifaceted, and unconventional. The porous boundaries between each discipline I have experimented with define my work. 

I have been associated with marginal creation theater, performed as an actress in conventional TV series and political humor cabarets with the Zapartistes, directed two documentaries, and staged concerts in both small venues and large ones, participated in variety shows such as the Adisq Galas and the cinema gala. 

I have often found myself facing editorial stances due to my role as artistic director on large public projects. Because I defend and believe that we can be demanding without being inaccessible, both in popular culture and elsewhere. Being demanding is synonymous with trusting the intelligence of the audience by elevating both form and content beyond a simplistic and banal interpretation.

Being demanding means trusting our collective imagination, which is not based on commercial or mercantile models, what I call the “artistic monoculture,” but rather reflects the diverse, colorful, and complex world we live in. 

In the private sphere, creation is an act of faith, a lifestyle choice, and a state of mind, a psychological, emotional, and philosophical reflection. In the public sphere, art, for me, is a way to measure the progress of a society.

To celebrate and honor creation requires from decision-makers an intelligence and a strong cultural vision. Ultimately, the artist wants to create a dialogue with the audience by presenting relevant and singular works. Ensuring dialogue in all its forms—subversive, humorous, dramatic, or symbolic—in narrative and aesthetic explorations that are always renewed is my goal. 

Being undisciplined means stepping off the beaten path and being uncompromising. 

Brigitte Poupart