November 06, 2003 -

"The city — life itself." - Marie Brassard

Ottawa, Ontario -- Judging by the number of lenses trained on our everyday lives, it would seem that the eye of God has been replaced by the eye of the camera. In order to explore the "reality" of the urban experience, the National Arts Centre (NAC) Studio will be trans-formed into a loft apartment overlooking downtown Montreal.

From November 12 to 15 at 20:00, the NAC French Theatre transports the audience to the heart of Montreal with La Noirceur. In this, her most recent work, playwright Marie Brassard continues her investigation (begun with her extraordinary fable Jimmy, créature de rêve) of the link between the voice and the body, between art and convention, between artist and obsession, between humanity and technology. These two strikingly personal plays have established Marie Brassard as a unique voice in contemporary theatre.

In Jimmy, créature de rêve, Marie Brassard unfurled before us such stuff as dreams are made on: audiences will recall the scene where an actress's microphone suddenly goes dead — "an actor's greatest fear" and worst nightmare, tantamount to a sudden memory loss, a complete blank. In La Noirceur, Marie Brassard, together with actor/dancer Guy Trifiro, leads us into the nocturnal darkness of the metropolis, alive with sounds and fleeting shadows, poetry and giddiness. Interweaving voices and soundtracks, shifting between levels of reality, Brassard brings us face to face with a world — our own — where the boundaries between public and private are increasingly fluid, and the relationship between individuals and technology is increasingly intimate. Theatre of light and shadow, complete with giant screen and surround sound!

Anonymous images of Montreal
One after another, several people whose identity we don't know describe their bedtime rituals. Then a young woman appears. She tells us that a real estate developer has just bought the old warehouse in downtown Montreal where she rents a loft, and intends to convert the building into a luxury condo complex. The young woman and her fellow tenants have been given notice. One of the first apartments slated for renovation belongs to one of her friends, an artist, who decides to relocate to New York. His upcoming move becomes a symbol for everything the young woman is about to lose: her friends, her magnificent window views of Montreal, her neighbourhood, her daily routines, her familiar landmarks. One day she slips into her friend's half-renovated loft, where she finds a photograph of a group of young workers taken years ago when the building still housed factories. She begins to invent a story… a story of loss, whose central character is one of the young workmen in the photo. Between telephone calls and other exchanges with her friend, now far away in New York, her story gradually takes shape even her daily existence is increasingly threatened.

At the close of the play, the characters we met at the beginning return. This time they describe their morning rituals, their habits upon waking—and now at last we understand who these people are.

"We are irresistibly drawn into the performance by Marie Brassard's intense, extraordinarily sensual stage presence and by the way this author/creator has distanced the written text from her deliberate, highly stylized physical language."

- Solange Lévesque, Le Devoir

The human voice of Marie Brassard
Marie Brassard trained at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique de Québec and has devoted her career primarily to creating works for the stage. A longtime collaborator of acclaimed writer/director Robert Lepage, she co-wrote and performed in The Dragon Trilogy, The Polygraph, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, and The Geometry of Miracles. She also played Lady Macbeth in Lepage's Macbeth and Ariel in his The Tempest, both of which toured throughout North America and in Europe, Asia and Australia. For film, she co-wrote the screenplay (with Robert Lepage) and played Lucie Champagne in the film version of The Polygraph, and played Hanako in the comedy Nô, directed by Lepage. She also appeared in The Claim, directed by British director Michael Winterbottom, and in La Loi du cochon, directed by Quebec's Éric Canuel. She played Francine Juneau in the popular satirical TV series Bunker, le cirque, directed by Pierre Houle.

Two years ago she founded her own company, Infrarouge Théâtre, the creative crucible for her extraordinary one-woman play Jimmy, créature de rêve. Subsequently translated into English and German, the play astonished audiences across North America and Europe, not to mention at the National Arts Centre last season.

The National Arts Centre French Theatre gratefully acknowledges the support of Radio-Canada (La Première Chaîne and La Chaîne culturelle).

Information:
Guy Warin
Communications Officer
National Arts Centre French Theatre
(613) 947-7000 or 1 866 850-ARTS (2787), ext. 759
Fax (613) 966-2828 gwarin@nac-cna.ca