1 Pol Pelletier is a well-known and widely respected woman of theatre in Québec: actor, director, playwright, artistic director, acting theorist, and teacher. She is equally well known for her commitment to the total transformation of stage practice. Her involvement in theatre began in the 1960s. Then, early in her professional career, she co-founded two experimental theatre companies: the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal (TEM, 1975) and the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes (TEF, 1979). It was a time when others shared her conviction that change is essential and were willing to spend time and energy collaborating in the exploration of experimentation's potential. The TEM and the TEF were remarkable laboratories of collaborative creation in Montréal. The TEF, in which Pelletier played the leading role between 1979 and 1985, was likely the first feminist theatre company in Canada, and perhaps even the first in North America, with its own house. The atmosphere at the TEF was heady for players and spectators; it was also exhausting and often tense, as Pelletier's vision and drive stirred simultaneously intense enthusiasm and intense controversy. However, her contribution to theories of acting and the understanding of women's memory, creativity, physical presence, and spirit in theatrical performance cannot be overestimated.

2 After a decade Pelletier felt the need to take a break and give herself some personal space and distance. She resigned from the TEF and, having already travelled to South America, she went on an extended voyage to India. Five years later she wrote the autobiographical performance piece Joie (premiered 1990), in which she stepped back and reflected on her theatrical work between 1975 and 1985, what she had accomplished, and where she was in the present. The play shows that her innovative work, although passionately gratifying, was never easy. Pelletier's objective in Joie is to recapture memory, to celebrate high points of an exciting decade, and to examine low points carefully. Joie mirrors in evocative shards some of the many faces of Pol Pelletier, as herself— consummate actor and writer—and as the many characters she played during this intensely creative period. In the alternation between re-creation of roles played in the past and questions still erupting in the present, Pelletier captures in the play the many conflicting emotions she felt in her ten-year commitment to the transformation of theatrical conventions and practices: "en écrivant ce spectacle, je voulais répondre à des questions de fond sur mon métier."3 Her choice of a play as the medium for retrospective reflection, rather than an essay, highlights the fact that for Pelletier theory has not ever been abstract. Rather, the theoretical imperative for her is thought, emotion, and imagination in action on the public stage.

3 We can see, then, that Joie is experimental, autobiographical theatre.4 It is also autoreferential in its reflections on doing theatre, in that its primary focus is not on particular events in Pelletier's personal life, as autobiographical traditions might lead us to expect. Instead, it is a play about making plays.5 It has historical and testimonial elements, but its salient and sustained component is a theoretical exploration for other ways of doing theatre, particularly other ways of women doing theatre.Without fresh performance strategies, women's stories are likely to remain buried beneath the weight of sexist traditions and practices.

4 Joie was the first autobiographical retrospective in a theatrical trilogy: La Trilogies des histoires. Océan, the second one-woman performance, evokes the period 1985-1990 and themes of personal transformation when Pelletier's mother died and during the spiritual journey she took in India. Or, the third piece, is a return to the study in action of radically innovative theories of acting. For six years the three plays of the trilogy were a stage work in progress, with Pelletier performing and modifying successive versions.6 La Trilogie des histoires served as a mobile mirror that Pelletier wrote and performed to understand and share understanding of her quest as a woman of theatre for practices that offer the possibility of representing women in their integrity, from both inner and outer perspectives. The plays offer audiences the extraordinary opportunity of sharing the dazzling beauty of Pelletier's dream for theatre.At the same time, they show the harsh truth that the dream remains far from realized. The vision of what theatre could be is evoked in memories of earlier moments, while the voices of Pelletier's personae reveal profound disappointments. Joy is affirmed; love for spectators is expressed; yet there is grief that she failed to overcome lack of understanding in fellow players and publics.

5 Since the scripts of Océan and Or have never been published or deposited with the Centre des Auteurs Dramatiques, and so are unavailable for consultation, I have limited my study in this paper to the representation of ten years in Pelletier's theatrical career, as dramatized in Joie.

Theories of Acting / Ten years of Expermentation 1975-1985

6 Pelletier was convinced from the beginning of her career that theatrical conventions, as taught in theatre courses and applied through directors on most stages, deprived players of their vital energy by stressing textual interpretation over imaginative discovery and by relying upon sexist stereotypes that predetermine the ways in which roles are to be played and actions between characters are to be represented. In her view actors are sources of physical force and spiritual vision with the potential, if only they are able to release them, of bringing about transformations in themselves and in spectators. Untrammelled experimentation can help to decondition actors and free them from the straitjackets that internalized stereotypes and ready-to-play theatrical conventions have constructed in their bodies and their minds. It can quell the fear, guilt, and doubt that individuals often feel when they are moving off the path beaten by voices of authorities and into the unknown. Pelletier's perspective on experimental theatre has always involved the whole person—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In order to get into the regions where transformation can occur, preconceived notions about movement, sounds, voice, and space must be set aside; scripts inscribed in memory must be forgotten and primitive work with the body must be the starting point: "La voix qui est branchée à mon coccyx qui est branché à mes pieds, qui sont branchés à ma tête. SAUTE! SAUTE! Déplacer de l'air, fouler la terre, avoir des os et des muscles et quasi en mourir de ravissement" (Joie 97).7

7 In Pelletier's approach actors, previously conditioned to believe that costumes, make-up, blocking, and dialogue constitute their roles, begin through a return to pre-linguistic corporeal presence, so they may hear the impulses and messages from within, while moving their bodies to the rhythms of their own visceral sounds.Her work involved stripping away non-essential decoration so as to get down to bare minima. Such an unconventional perspective on doing theatre led her to challenge established practices of acting, writing, directing, and teaching insofar as both women and men are concerned, since these practices rely almost exclusively on sexist conventions that literally and figuratively place women in corsets and predetermine the stories that can be told.

8 Pelletier's first experimental initiative was in 1975 when she organized a workshop at the TEM for research on the female character. She hoped participants in the workshop would create characters other than mothers, lovers, and servants. The workshop involved exercises to strip away inhibitions and false knowledge and to discover sources of the participants' own erotic energy. They worked to remove crippling emotions, such as fear and guilt, to set aside doubt when accused of being mad or ugly, to refuse taboos surrounding the female body, and to release the strength that had lain dormant in their suppressed capacity for physical aggression.

9 Next, Pelletier collaborated for several months with director and actor Luce Guilbeault and eleven other writers and actors in the creation of La Nef des sorcières (Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, March 1976). Pelletier played a lesbian character but found that the role as written by Marie-Claire Blais gave her insufficient scope for theatrical experimentation and celebration of the jouissance she experienced when making love with a woman. She wrote a second monologue and played them both, wearing a wig in one and beginning the other by angrily ripping off the wig to reveal a defiantly shaved head. Pelletier has underlined the importance in her career of this, her first experience writing for and playing in women's theatre: "Mon premier vrai spectacle de femmes. Uniquement des femmes. Je dois beaucoup à Luce. Pour la première fois, j'ai écrit pour le théâtre, et c'était important, ça valait quelque chose, les femmes" (Trac 105).8 In 1979 Pelletier collaborated for a second time in a collective creation called Célébrations at the TNM. Pelletier performed an extract from Nicole Brossard's Le sens apparent and Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit ["Night Cows"]. She is perhaps best known in the theatre world for her performance of Les vaches de nuit, a play in which, indeed, "a strong, tall, as-yet-unspoken feminine mythology" bursts onto the stage (see citation at the top of this article).The moment of recognition, through performance, of the extraordinary theatricality of Marchessault's text revealed to Pelletier the very basis of her feminist artistic practice and theoretical reflection (See Joie 36-7).

10 With the encouragement of TEM co-founder Jean-Pierre Ronfard, in September 1976 Pelletier, Guilbault, and two others created the first TEM spectacle de femmes: Essai en trois mouvements pour trois voix de femmes.9 A study without words of women's voices and bodies in motion, it experimented with voice, movement, props, and relations between actors and spectators. The following year they did Finalement, again a play without words that was the second in a triptych of experimental plays. In 1978 the women of the TEM collectively created À ma mère, à ma mère, à ma mère, à ma voisine. In this play, experimentation on characterization and words was added to ongoing play with voice and body movements. The violently angry desire to kill debilitating stereotypes of motherhood underlies the thematic structure of À ma mère. The three actors (Pelletier, Louise Laprade, and Nicole Lecavalier) and the stage manager (Dominique Gagnon) improvised and wrote parts of the text and staging instructions. As published with many personal notes and photos, À ma mère retains its qualities of collaboration, orality, improvisation, and theatricality. The publication in 1978 of Trac Femmes. Cahier de théâtre expérimental, a collection of short essays written by women who had participated with Pelletier at the TEM since 1975, shows a quite large community in search of new ways of doing theatre. Their analyses are probing and passionate. In Pelletier's essay "Histoire d'une féministe" she situates herself as a strong feminist and explores what such a siting means for doing theatre, as well as what feminist theatre can do to combat sexist stereotypes prevailing in society and in women's own views of themselves and the world: "Il est grand temps qu'on fasse une analyse objective de ce métier, qu'on cesse de l'entourer de mille fadaises romantiques. Que les comédiennes se rendent compte des images de femmes parfaitement rétrogrades et stupides qu'elles véhiculent pour la plupart" (97).10

11 The radical feminist positions affirmed in both À ma mère and Trac appear to have driven a wedge between Pelletier and most of those at the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal, whose views on experimental theatre did not include any form of gender analysis and whose experimental practice, according to Pelletier in Joie, frequently included sexist stereotyping. A schism occurred, followed in February 1979 by the founding of the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes by Pelletier, Louise Laprade, and Nicole Lecavalier. The mission of the TEF was to offer the public a theatre where all roles and all positions were held by women. The TEF quickly became a centre and a symbol for the women's movement in Québec. As Noiseux has discussed, participation in the TEF required full commitment on the part of individuals, since it aimed at the total transformation of culture, knowledge, history, and human relations:Les débuts du TEF n'engageaient pas que l'objet à créer, mais l'être tout entier: corps et esprit. Et si l'on proposait une autre définition de la cosmogonie, des mythes, de la marche de l'Histoire, du monde qui nous entoure, des relations entre les femmes et les hommes? [...] Il faut découvrir une autre manière de voir et de dire."11

12 Working toward their mission involved Pelletier and other members of the company in the active training of women in all aspects of theatre, as well as workshops, festivals, lectures, conferences, and informal encounters. The years between 1979 and 1985 at the TEF were rich with a wide range of theatrical and paratheatrical events designed to construct a changed theatre community that allowed women to build on strengths, participate in fresh explorations, and give artistic form to new mythologies. At the same time, Pelletier continued to develop her theories on acting. "Jouer au féminin," which she wrote in 1982 and in which she mentions her admiration for Grotowski, is an important treatise on acting.As Josette Féral has discussed, Pelletier's well-developed theories on acting (le jeu) are all the more impressive since there are few theoretical pieces by women of theatre anywhere on creating for theatre ("La place des femmes" 113-16).

13 The character in Joie, who evokes chronologically events at the TEM and the TEF between 1975-1985, takes readers and spectators into the experimental processes implemented by Pelletier and her colleagues to give theatrical form to at least some of the stories and mythologies that women have conceived upon finding the source of their psychic, physical, and spiritual harmony.

The Play's the Thing: Joie

14 In Joie Pelletier portrays herself exploring memories of her bold and uncompromising creative initiatives while doing experimental theatre in the féminine during the decade 1975-1985. The play is a sustained reflection on the theoretical and practical questions through which she was working at that time, as seen from the 1990s, when these questions seemed to have been forgotten. The play provides the distance Pelletier needed in order to ask what was achieved during those years of energy, optimism, and new community. Joie crosses generic boundaries in that it can be seen as both a play and a performance piece. Jeannie Forte describes the performance artist as not playing a role written for her by others, but rather performing autobiographically, speaking and writing for herself, affirming the reality of her material and corporeal presence, making her subversive, satirical points using non-canonical acting strategies, and undermining the symbolic structure of dominant representation systems, whose arbitrariness and contingency she is exposing and challenging (see particularly 252). Joie uses poetic devices to draw attention to theoretical concerns, and it mixes fact and fiction with dramatic abandon. The first word pronounced in the play echoes its title: "Joie" (9), which is further reinforced by the leitmotif: "LES FEMMES, L'ART ET LA JOIE!" (15).12 However, the irony that must be seen to underlie the play's title and this leitmotif is highlighted throughout the play by its transformations, as joy is replaced by fear, problems, and culture: "Les femmes, l'art et la peur" (22); "Les femmes, l'art et les problèmes" (63);"Les femmes, l'art et la culture" (81).

15 The rich theme of women, art, and joy and the subject of memories of a decade of theatrical experimentation—along with the shrill barbs of irony that permeate this retrospective performance—receive sustained emphasis throughout the play with the interlocutor Pelletier created for her persona: "l'oiseau noir de la mémoire." This "black lark of her memory" (Joy 6) is the protagonist's left hand wearing a black glove, which emerges from behind her back and intervenes to remind her of each successive incident as it reappears from the past. The "black lark of her memory" is thus an accomplice and an old friend, but also a disruptive trick-ster figure standing in the way of any complacent glossing over of painful memories.

16 Scenes in Joie cover the founding of the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal and the beginning of work in collective creation with women. Pelletier was extremely active during this period of return to the simplicity of women's uncostumed bodies in motion: she produced the extraordinary À ma mère, à ma mère, à ma mère, à ma voisine; she wrote and performed the lesbian Marcelle in La Nef des sorcières; she founded and operated the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes; she created Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit in Célébrations at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde; she collaborated with international theatre companies and travelled abroad; she wrote and created La Lumière blanche (a feminist tragedy and exorcism of debilitating fear); she staged Marchessault's La Terre est trop courte, Violette Leduc and works by other radical playwrights, such as Lise Vaillancourt; and, finally, she resigned from the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes in 1985.

17 Pelletier's quest throughout the decade was to work with other women seeking ways to inhabit their own bodies, hear their own voices, acknowledge their own feelings, explore their imaginations, find or invent stage means to show their experiences without the filter of patriarchal interpretive traditions, affirm the reality and legitimacy of women's memory, and exercise material control of theatre space and technologies. Joie recalls a turbulent and exciting period in Quebec theatre and society; it revisits outrageous acts and painful disappointments, dreams and frustrations, successes, blocked paths and deep misunderstandings; it evokes memories of women coming together in theatre, sharing their passions and working there to bring new performative and interpretive communities into being.

18 There are also memories of these same communities bursting apart, as the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes ultimately did. The character in Joie representing Pelletier draws attention with sad irony to the distance between the shared lofty ideals at the TEF of changing society and the painful recognition that they could not even get along with each other: "On prétend changer le monde et on ne peut pas s'entendre à quatre personnes?" (75).13 Joie sustains a strand of lament from beginning to end for the loss of dreams, passions, commitment, and shared vision. The play is an exploration and a search for the reasons why women's collective energy— which had been so powerful in the 1970s and 1980s as a means for affirming communities of women, with theatre companies doing collective creations, opening other performance spaces, meeting in bookstores and other public spaces, founding publishing houses, and collaborating in resistance to injustice—has dissipated. Joie does not offer facile explanations for why the social climate has changed. Instead, it explores factors: the absence of models for women coming together for creative and experimental artistic purposes; the equally serious absence of non-patriarchal performative and interpretive communities and spaces; the dominance and ubiquity of patriarchal cultural references and the roles for women that go with them; values placed by dominant socio-cultural practices on written texts; isolation of individuals; generalized fear; distrust of women who take on positions of power; and burn-out.

19 Toward the end of this richly layered, multivocal production, the protagonist of Joie talks to the black-gloved left hand of memory, reminding the bird of the radically new theatre aesthetic she forged in the 1970s based on the connections among women's voices and all parts of their bodies: powerful, mobile bodies taking up as much stage and theatre space as possible in defiance of all conventions of beauty and propriety:Tu te souviens des années 70 où tu forgeais une esthétique complètement neuve: les femmes sur scène, bougeantes, impudiques, explosives, pas maquillées, pas coiffées, pas «costumées», on voyait leurs corps et leurs muscles et leur sueur, et leurs pieds, et ça se passait dans des espaces éclatés, des lieux inventés, avec le public tout mélangé là-dedans, assis de toutes sortes de façons bizarres, il ne savait plus si ce qu'il voyait était «beau» ou «laid», il n'avait plus de références, il était troublé. (93-4)14The protagonist concludes her theoretical reflection at this moment with a simple but urgent question about beauty. If women step completely out of the beauty myth that has held them prisoner for so long, are there any aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, and ethical traditions that can endure unchanged?: "Qu'est-ce que la beauté?"(94).The suggestion is that beauty, like women's myths, has not yet been adequately told or represented in dominant cultures. Pelletier recalls in Joie the years when the play was the thing whereby she would catch the conscience of theatre and society.

Joie and Québec Theatre in the Feminine

20 I have noticed that when social or cultural practices are seen to be feminist, or even to belong primarily to areas of women's activities, they are excluded discursively from recognition as experimental practices. It is as though women's creativity and inventiveness are viewed as uncongenial or otherwise contradictory to that which is artistically or scientifically experimental. Of course, such an inability to see beyond the "feminism" word is alien to Pelletier's approach to theatre. She and her colleagues retained, after all, the appellation of an experimental theatre company after they separated from the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal to form the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes. In fact, Joie offers a fine analysis of all the components of prevailing theatre practice that call out for experimentation; it provides theatrical demonstrations of the experiments that Pelletier, her colleagues, and members of her audiences carried out. In its refusal of productions based on the fetishisation of women's bodies, it illustrates well the integration of Brechtian theory into feminist theory through gestic feminist practice, as Elin Diamond has discussed: "[W]hat the spectator sees is not a mere miming of social relationship, but a reading of it, an interpretation by a historical subject who supplements (rather than disappears into) the production of meaning (90).

21 As described above, Joie can be read as a theoretical program on how she and her colleagues envisioned the renewal of theatre in ways that would make it a non-sexist cultural practice providing actors, members of the production community, writers, and the public opportunities to know the passion of "nous qui brûlons du feu" (35), of those 'who burn with fire', with a freed imagination, an expressive voice, and a body unconstrained by social conditioning. To demonstrate women's right to control their own bodies, memories, imagination, and desires, Pelletier cites the text by Nicole Brossard, "Le sens apparent," that she played in Célébrations: "nous appelons corps la forme que prennent nos corps une fois qu'ils se sont exercés à la mémoire, à l'imagination et à l'appétit"(35, 36)15 In Pelletier's work the actor's body has consistently been the site of struggle, enunciation, and myth-making.

22 Despite the positive connotations of titles such as Joie or Célébrations, it is important to note the emphasis placed throughout the play, and indeed throughout Pelletier's theatre career, on the theme of fear—fear that is so deeply rooted in women's bodies that it is rarely acknowledged, despite its debilitating impact. Pelletier's practice for uprooting fear necessitated recognition of the violence to self and to others that is needed for such uprooting. "Niceness" will not do it. Women must learn assertiveness, even violence to themselves and in their relations with other women, if they are to go beyond the boundaries dictated by fear:ON A PEUR.
ON A PEUR. [...]
On a peur de s'engager dans le pacte, la fidélité, la responsabilité ... de l'amour!
On a peur de s'engager dans la violence! Oh non, même pas la violence physique. La violence de ce que nous ressentons, car ce que nous ressentons est violent. Et nous avons peur d'identifier précisément ce que nous ressen-tons si violemment.
Qu'est-ce qui se passe ENTRE nous?
Qu'est-ce qu'on laisse dans l'ombre?
Qu'est-ce que cette femme catalyse d'insupportable, et d'indicible, et de trop douloureux en chacune de nous? (emphasis in original, 73-74)16

23 Joie begins with awareness of injustices and the denunciation of stereotypes, exclusions, and demonstrations of ideologies at play in the constitution of existing performative and interpretive communities. As Pelletier took careful stock of representational practices in dominant culture, as well as the opportunities available to her as a member of the theatre community, she found— even of the boldest of experimental theatre companies—no room for women as agents and players in their own spectacles. From the start Joie expresses the anger she felt in the face of such exclusion: "Le langage primitif des débuts était lié à une révolte extrême, un rejet radical de la société et de toutes ses manifestations culturelles" (80).17 It also expresses the urgent need to refuse to play any longer the subservient roles that serve the status quo.The play is a blueprint for action, beginning with aggressive demonstrations of physical power and control.

24 It was creating Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit, as well as Célébrations, that revealed directly to Pelletier the psychic and physical states where the inner dimensions of acting become evident. This revelation confirmed the path she was already taking in theatre; it became the basis of her theatrical research:"Ce jour-là je suis tombée dans ce que j'ai appelé par la suite le véritable «état de jeu»: un état physique et psychique très particulier qui est devenu la base de mes recherches" (Joie 37).18 To reach this true state of acting it was necessary to get dominant cultural practices and words out of the heads and bodies of actors, directors, and spectators.

25 Pelletier explores at some length in Joie the reasons why the approaches of collective creation, very popular among Quebec theatre companies in the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to lend themselves particularly well to feminist experimental theatre having the objectives just mentioned. In fact, the play develops an implicit equation between experimental theatre and collective creation:C'est par l'oralité que les créations collectives de femmes ont vu le jour.
Par le parlage.
En se racontant nos histoires de femmes, car cette matière n'existait pas encore dans les livres, ou si peu. Aussi, en inventant, dans la vie de tous les jours, des nouveaux gestes, des nouveaux comportements, des nouveaux langages. [...]
Les créations collectives étaient aussi étonnantes parce qu'elles étaient le reflet des innovations que nous amenions dans nos vies. [...]
La création collective, au point de départ comme au point d'arrivée, ce n'est pas un texte, c'est des corps qui bougent et qui font des sons. [...] (47-48)19

26 Joie, as portrait of the experimental artist as militant feminist and radical woman of theatre, takes readers and audiences through the experience of working individually and collectively in corporeal, concrete, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. It is a thoroughly ambitious project. Pelletier's protagonist recognises, however, that it has had mitigated impact.20 She indicates her extreme discouragement in not finding Quebec theatre transformed, not even finding many women in theatre working together to achieve such transformation, despite the fact that there is now a significant number of women in senior artistic and administrative positions. Even the memory of the struggle seems to have been lost in such a short time: "Comment ça se fait que l'histoire que je vous raconte est tombée dans l'oubli? Comment ça se fait que c'est moi qui doit raconter cette histoire? Comment ça se fait que les femmes qui m'ont suivie et qui ont bâti leur travail sur le mien font comme si ce travail n'avait jamais existé?" (90).21

27 In response to this question regarding the absence of strong feminist awareness in today's theatre and society, Pelletier's character offers the surprising hypothesis that women's demands and experimental creative power were so compelling and relevant that they awakened endemic, paralysing fear and thereby frightened even those who were making them, causing women and girls to feel guilty about being seen to be making so much noise and causing upset:Tu sais ce que je pense? Je pense que nous, les femmes nous nous sentons collectivement COUPABLES d'avoir crié haut et fort dans les années 70, même les jeunes femmes qui n'étaient pas là, et qui s'imaginent que tout est réglé, elles aussi sont coupables, la culpabilité est partout, dans l'air, dans nos os. Je pense que nous nous sommes fait très peur et que nous n'osons plus rien dire. [...] Je pense que le mouvement des femmes a posé des questions fondamentales qui nous ont tous et toutes secoué-e-s jusque dans nos racines, où nous avons touché et l'HORREUR, et le RÊVE. (90-91).22Despite the apparent absence at the present time of success in Pelletier's bold experimental endeavor over more than a decade to change theatre and society, the conclusion of Joie affirms the character's commitment to the continuing struggle—to keep the flame burning—and to the belief that it is possible to get rid of the stifling dead wood inside each individual and society collectively:J'ai brûlé et j'ai crié. Plusieurs fois.
Pour allumer le feu sur la place publique, il faut commencer par prendre tout le bois mort qui est à l'intérieur et le jeter dans la flamme. Tous les jours, j'en brûle encore un petit bout. [...] L'espoir est une poire dans une foire ... (98-99)23

28 In Joie Pelletier has given a complex and composite portrait of herself and other women as creative, self-reflexive writers and theatre artists. While it is a one-woman show, it weaves a fabric of multiple sounds, voices and images. Using first- and second-person pronouns—for example in the dialogue between herself and "the black lark of memory"—she projects herself into the stage personae of this autobiographical performance piece as warrior, player, writer, director, and artistic director. She recounts and re-plays old roles, but always with a difference and in a fresh tapestry. There is new textual material and old. Around the new textual material, Pelletier has woven the voices of other of her own published or performed texts, or collective creations in which she participated. The narrative contains additional quotations written by other writers from plays she produced or played in.

29 Joie is a celebration of an exhilarating decade in women's thea-tre in Quebec. It is also a celebration of women's memory, creativity, physical presence, and spirit. It is an important treatise on the art of acting and the profession of theatre. The characters in the story it tells did not achieve all their objectives. Indeed, in many ways, the story shows the power of fear and dominant cultural practices to crush women's vision, creativity, and erotic energy. Much remains to be done before women and men can take their place and exercise their full power on public stages. This play, including Pelletier's many performances of it in Quebec, in France, and elsewhere, is a significant step in affirming the power of experimental theatre by women.

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