April 11, 2006 -

Ottawa, Ontario -- For his sixth season at the head of the National Arts Centre (NAC) French Theatre, Artistic Director Denis Marleau has renewed his commitment to offering a varied, innovative programme that is artistically coherent, vital, and in tune with contemporary artistic thinking—theatre that is moving, astonishing, and thought-provoking “through its inverted trajectories, subjective interconnections and dream play.” In his 2006–07 season he has chosen to highlight the work of playwrights, directors and designers whose visionary practice defines what theatre is today: in Mr. Marleau’s words, “as much a story to be told as an art form to be shaped, as much a snapshot of reality as a metaphysical exploration, as much a portal to intimacy as a body inverted to challenge the anecdotal.”

The artists featured in the upcoming season include several with whom the NAC French Theatre has forged strong connections since Mr. Marleau’s appointment: Brigitte Haentjens, Wajdi Mouawad, Marie Brassard, Céline Bonnier, Lorraine Côté, Gabriel Gascon, Pierre Lebeau, and Les 7 doigts de la main.

Denis Marleau invites French Theatre audiences to discover a world of engaging intimacy, lyrical poetry and astonishing scope, “a space for wildly contrasting texts and performances, for works that trigger uncertainty and ignite sparks of beauty that remind us that the stage is first and foremost a living space inseparable from the world whose every aspect it seeks to illuminate, between past and present.”

By special invitation

2006 is the centenary of the birth of the great Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who revolutionized 20th-century theatre. NAC French Theatre celebrates this literary giant with presentations of two of his works: Lorraine Côté’s lively staging of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot)—a Théâtre de la Bordée (Quebec, QC) production that was an instant hit when it premiered in Quebec in January 2006—and the latest in Denis Marleau’s series of “technological phantasmagorias,” Comédie (Play).
French Theatre audiences are familiar with the deeply personal and original approach of director Brigitte Haentjens, a leading figure on the contemporary theatre scene whose recent NAC credits include La Nuit juste avant les forêts, Farces conjugales, L’Éden Cinéma, and La Cloche de verre. Denis Marleau is pleased to welcome her back for the upcoming season: she will direct Louise Dupré’s Tout comme elle (featuring a cast of 50 actresses) and a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (with Céline Bonnier and Sébastien Ricard), and will host the sixth Laboratoire du Théâtre français (French Theatre Lab).

Les 7 doigts de la main are coming back! Our audiences raved about the company’s eponymous first production, presented in December 2005. After that dazzling debut, we’re delighted to continue our relationship with this exceptional troupe whose members blend circus arts with theatre in a uniquely creative way. French Theatre is pleased to coproduce and present their latest show, Traces, showcasing the impressive talents of five young actor-acrobats.
You’ll discover a new voice from a distant land in our exclusive North American engagement of Oxygène, by the young Russian playwright Ivan Viripaev. Premiered in Brussels in September 2004, this production from Cie Fraction (Brussels), staged by Bulgarian director Galin Stoev, literally took Europe by storm.
Denis Marleau gives “carte blanche” this season to actor Pierre Lebeau, who—with his square boxer’s build, his shambling, bear-like presence, and his magnificent, resonant voice—will present a bouquet of his favourite poems (“Don’t worry, it’s not an anthology!”) in a lively, engaging evening that is part performance art, part theatre and part variety show.

Theatre and Studio Series

October 31–November 4, 2006 • Theatre
Tout comme elle
Written by Louise Dupré
Adapted and directed by Brigitte Haentjens
Featuring a cast of 50 actresses including Paule Baillargeon, Catherine Bégin, Céline Bonnier, Evelyne de la Chenelière, Louise Latraverse, Nicole Leblanc, Anne-Marie White and the mesmerizing Janine Sutto
Produced by Sibyllines (Montreal) in coproduction with L’Usine C (Montreal)

Acclaimed for her keen insight into the nature of femininity, director Brigitte Haentjens tackles the meticulous writing of Louise Dupré (author of La Memoria) to shape this moving and evocative theatrical and choral work. From its first performance (in Montreal in January 2006), Tout comme elle emerged as a social phenomenon where mothers and daughters could reach out to each other, discover each other, recognize each other… in a dazzling moment of grace that demonstrates the power of theatre to heal the soul.

November 8–11, 2006 • Studio
La Fin de Casanova
Written by Marina Tsvetayeva
Translated from the Russian by André Markowicz
Directed by Denis Marleau
With Gabriel Gascon, Éliane Préfontaine and Gaétan Nadeau
Produced by UBU compagnie de creation (Montreal) in coproduction with Espace GO (Montreal) and the National Arts Centre French Theatre

Russian poet and playwright Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941) filled her poetry with fragments of her own life, a life driven by her violent desire to be at the heart of turmoil, a life filled with momentous meetings—Rilke, Pasternak—, moulded by countless love affairs and sundered by the ruthless bayonets of history. To stage this unique text, resonant with echoes of Pushkin and Musset, Denis Marleau has enlisted a cherished colleague: the inimitable Gabriel Gascon.

November 29–December 2, 2006 • Studio
Peepshow
Written, directed and performed by Marie Brassard
Original music and sound design by Alexander MacSween
Produced by Infrarouge (Montreal) in coproduction with the National Arts Centre French Theatre, the Festival de théâtre des Amériques (Montreal), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), the Vienna International Festival, Spielzeiteuropa/Berliner Festspiele (Berlin), and the Göteborg Dance & Theatre Festival (Göteborg, Sweden)

In this fascinating new creation, Marie Brassard continues the artistic journey she began with Jimmy, créature de rêve/Jimmy and La Noirceur/The Darkness, both presented at the NAC French Theatre. Thanks to dazzling technological wizardry, she constructs a vocal hall of mirrors where her own voice is scarcely recognizable save in the fleeting harmonic transitions from one character to another. Brassard’s enigmatic renderings of infinitely fragile metamorphoses are offered like a unique and personal gift.

December 12–16, 2006 • Theatre
En attendant Godot
Written by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Lorraine Côté
With Jacques Leblanc, Jack Robitaille, Denise Gagnon, Hugues Frenette and Lucien Ratio
Produced by Théâtre de la Bordée (Quebec)

Lorraine Côté directs a lively, funny Godot, in the manner of Beckett himself. Jack Robitaille and Jacques Leblanc bring rare conviction and sensitivity to their portrayal of the playwright’s immense vision, a relentlessly taut blend of clownish humour and metaphysical speculation. Suspended in time, whose inexorable mechanism grinds on in the void, they go about the business of existing—with austerity, with dignity, with tenderness.

January 31–February 3, 2007 • Studio
Exclusive North American engagement
Oxygène
Written by Ivan Viripaev
Directed by Galin Stoev
With Céline Bolomey, Gilles Collard (music), Stéphane Oertli and Antoine Oppenheim
Produced by Cie Fraction Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium)

Born in 1974 in Irkutsk, Siberia, Ivan Viripaev brings a distinctive style and non-traditional performance approach to his investigation of “the positioning of theatre in relation to the outside world.” Director Galin Stoev was born in 1969 in Varna, Bulgaria. A fervently iconoclastic creator, he frequently exhorts his actors, “Don’t play madness—be madness.” Oxygène is a show unlike any other: instead of “scenes” and “tableaux” we get “compositions,” and the show’s ten sections are written like songs “with words instead of notes.”

February 27–March 3, 2007 • Theatre
Traces
A collective creation by Les 7 doigts de la main
Directed and choreographed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider
With Héloïse Bourgeois, Francisco Cruz, Raphael Cruz, Brad Henderson and Will Underwood
Produced by Les 7 doigts de la main in coproduction with the National Arts Centre French Theatre

The troupe’s second original creation extends Les 7 doigts de la main’s unique and engaging concept of a new, accessible kind of circus where astonishing acrobatic feats illustrate much more than physical prowess: they’re poetry expressed in gestures, ideas translated into movement. Traces, a collective creation by the seven original “fingers,” is performed by five talented young actor-acrobats fresh out of Montreal’s École nationale de cirque. The show was inspired by the idea of “leaving traces, tracing your own path, drawing, writing.”

March 27–31, 2007 • Theatre
Forêts
Written and directed by Wajdi Mouawad
With Jean Alibert, Olivier Constant, Véronique Côté, Linda Laplante, Patrick Le Mauff, Marie-France Marcotte, Bernard Meney, Anne-Marie Olivier, Jean-Sébastien Ouellette, Marie-Ève Perron and Emmanuel Schwartz
Produced by Au carré de l’hypoténuse and Abé carré cé carré, compagnies de création (Montreal)
in coproduction with L’Espace Malraux – Scène nationale de Chambéry et de la Savoie, Le Fanal – Scène nationale de Saint-Nazaire, Théâtre de la Manufacture – Centre dramatique national de Nancy-Lorraine, Scène nationale d’Aubusson – Théâtre Jean Lurçat, L’Hexagone – Scène nationale de Meylan, Les Francophonies en Limousin, Le Beau Monde? compagnie Yannick Jaulin, Scène nationale de Petit-Quevilly et de Mont-Saint-Aignan, MCLA de Nantes, Théâtre du Trident (Quebec) and ESPACE GO (Montreal)

In his writing (Incendies/Scorched) as in his directing (Chekhov’s Les Trois Sœurs/Three Sisters), Wajdi Mouawad seeks to create an open, inclusive theatre that articulates the human experience, impressing his unique personal stamp on the playwright’s familiar tools: the wide-ranging intensity of poetic language, the desire to tell a story, and situations charged with dramatic power. Forêts premiered in Chambéry, France, in March 2006 and has since been widely presented.

April 11–14, 2007 • Studio
Orlando
Written by Virginia Woolf
Directed by Brigitte Haentjens
With Céline Bonnier and Sébastien Ricard
Produced by Sibyllines (Montreal) in coproduction with L’Usine C (Montreal)

Who, asks Brigitte Haentjens, is Orlando, “this woman masquerading as a man”? For this director, Virginia Woolf is the fount of feminist writing as we know it. Haentjens approaches this writer’s text, this writer’s thought, with the perceptivity that has marked her practice over the last decade: how to create without betraying the essence of the feminine, and how most accurately to represent the feminine.

May 1–5, 2007 • Theatre
World premiere
Lèvres
Written, directed and performed by Pierre Lebeau
With appearances by Benoît Charest and Béatrice Bonifassi
Produced by the National Arts Centre French Theatre in association with the Quebec Scene

Backed by jazzman Benoît Charest and singer Béatrice Bonifassi—composer and performer, respectively, of the award-winning soundtrack for the animated film The Triplets of Belleville—actor Pierre Lebeau offers the audience a bouquet of the poems that inspire him, from Gaston Miron to Jean-Paul Daoust by way of the glorious rantings of Claude Gauvreau and the elegant prose of Hubert Aquin. He envelops them in images, lifts them aloft with music (from Jimi Hendrix to Philip Glass) and, most of all, unleashes all their evocative power in a lively, engaging production that is part performance art, part theatre and part variety show.

Les Inclassables (“The Indefinables”)

October 26 & 27, 2006 • Rehearsal Hall A
Free admission
Comédie
Written by Samuel Beckett
A theatrical installation designed and directed by Denis Marleau
in collaboration with Stéphanie Jasmin
With Céline Bonnier, Ginette Morin and Paul Savoie
Coproduced by UBU, compagnie de création (Montreal), the National Arts Centre French Theatre, and Manège – Scène nationale de Maubeuge (France)

Don’t miss Denis Marleau’s third and latest “technological phantasmagoria,” following his stunning productions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles and Jon Fosse’s Dors mon petit enfant. Comédie is part of the NAC’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s birth, presented in association with the University of Ottawa Theatre Department.

Les Spectacles-midi
Lunchtime readings with music in the NAC Fourth Stage

This marks the fifth consecutive year of our popular series of lunchtime readings with music, presented in association with the NAC Orchestra and the Fourth Stage. This season, artistic coordinator Paul Lefebvre and music consultant and pianist Jean Desmarais invite you to enjoy an overview of the work of four leading Quebec post-war poets: Anne Hébert (1916–2000), Gaston Miron (1928–1996), Roland Giguère (1929–2003), and Paul-Marie Lapointe (b.1929). The series, entitled L’Âge de la parole (a magnificent title borrowed from Roland Giguère), is presented as a lead-in to the NAC’s Quebec Scene.

Série pour l’enfance (Family Theatre Series)

November 4 & 5, 2006 • Studio
Recommended for ages 5 to 10
CHUT!!
Written and choreographed by Hélène Langevin
Produced by Bouge de là (Montreal)

In her enchantingly playful works, Hélène Langevin conjures up the strange and magical world of dreams, with all their poetic mystery. NAC family audiences will remember Bouge de là’s lively Comme les cinq doigts de la main, presented in May 2005.

January 27 & 28, 2007 • Studio
Recommended for ages 4 to 8
Le Caillou de Saturne
Written by Martine Gagné
Directed by Catherine Hamann
Produced by the Théâtre du P’tit Loup (Montreal)

This new show by the Théâtre du P’tit Loup, creators of the charming Le temps court, Marithé, takes a delightful, perceptive look at the beauty of our world, from the infinitely small to the infinitely great.

February 24 & 25, 2007 • Studio
Recommended for ages 8 and up
Conte de la Lune
Written and directed by Philippe Soldevila
Based on the short stories of Pere Calders
Produced by the Théâtre des Confettis (Quebec) and the Théâtre populaire d’Acadie (Caraquet) in association with the Théâtre Sortie de Secours (Quebec)

In the harshly repressive Spain of General Franco, a father (a former inventor of better worlds, now reluctantly recycled into an inventor of things) is reunited with his 10-year-old son, Joan (an inventor of words), whom he hasn’t seen in five years. Coproduced by the Théâtre des Confettis, creators of Wigwam and the unforgettable performance/installation Amour, délices et ogre, and the Théâtre populaire d’Acadie, who brought us La petite ombre.

March 24 & 25, 2007 • Studio
Recommended for ages 5 to 9
L’Armoire
Written by Pascal Brullemans
Directed by Michel P. Ranger
Produced by the Théâtre de l’Avant-Pays (Montreal)

What does the cupboard represent? What memories are hidden inside? Key in hand, Céleste is bound and determined to find out. A fabulous new show from the talented puppeteers of the Théâtre de l’Avant-Pays, creators of À nous deux! and the classic Charlotte Sicotte.

April 21 & 22, 2007 • Studio
Recommended for ages 8 and up
Contes d’enfants réels
Written by Suzanne Lebeau
Directed by Gervais Gaudreault
Produced by Carrousel, compagnie de théâtre (Montreal)

In the words of playwright Suzanne Lebeau, “Being an adult and having children, being a child and having adults means finding out about love and pain, tenderness and anger, compromise...” Welcome to the real world of real children. The original 1993 production received awards for Outstanding Production for Young Audiences from the Quebec Theatre Critics’ Association and the Académie québécoise du théâtre. Contes d’enfants réels is presented at the NAC in association with the Quebec Scene.

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SÉRIE PASSEPORT
Maximum enjoyment: see all 9 plays! (5 in the Theatre, 4 in the Studio)

À LA CARTE
Build your own season of any five plays from the 2006–07 Theatre and Studio Series!

SÉRIE POUR L’ENFANCE
Build your own series of three, four or five plays.

Digital photographs of the artists featured in the NAC French Theatre 2006–07 season are available for download from www.nac-cna.ca/media. The photographs were specially commissioned from artist and photographer Gabor Szilasi.

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For more information, please contact:
Guy Warin, Communications & Media Relations Officer
French Theatre – Canada’s National Arts Centre
(613) 947-7000 or 1 866 850-2787, ext. 759
gwarin@nac-cna.ca