GLEN NICHOLS
“Il est donc urgent à l’heure actuelle de rapatrier et de se réapproprier notre vision, pour faire en sorte que nous puissions nous voir dans un miroir qui nous renvoie une image sur laquelle nous ayons un certain contrôle.” (H. Chiasson, “Comment traverser le tain” 13 )
"Le fait d’écrire au milieu d’une collectivité où l’écriture a toujours été considérée comme un luxe, pour ne pas dire un complot, va faire en sorte que cette forme d’expression bénéficiera ici d’une grande liberté. Tout devient alors possible, toutes les formes, tous les sujets, toutes les stratégies.” (H.Chiasson, Tangence 84)
This article, originally published in Les théâtres professionnels du Canada francophone entre mémoire et rupture, examines how the dramaturgy of Herménégilde Chiasson is an extension of his commitment to cultural affirmation in Acadian artistic expression. Chiasson has been a dominant figure in Acadian visual and performance arts for twenty-five years. Despite the remarkable variety of his plays, they consistently hinge on auto-referential and metatheatrical techniques that force the audience into a self-conscious relationship with the images depicted, whether traditional or iconoclastic. The result of this kind of post- Brechtian self-conscious bracketing of representations of Acadia is a thoughtful awakening and reaffirmation of contemporary cultural consciousness in modern Acadia.
Cette article, publié initialement dans Les théâtres professionnels du Canada francophone entre mémoire et rupture, explore la dramaturgie d’Herménégilde Chiasson et son engagement envers l’affirmation culturelle dans les arts acadiens. La voix de M.Chiasson a été omniprésent sur les scènes et dans les galéries d’Acadie depuis vingt-cinq ans. Malgré les importantes différences en ce qui a trait aux détails et aux approches particulières, toutes les pièces de Chiasson, utilisent constamment et immanquablement des techniques auto-référentielles et métathéâtrales pour forcer le public de découvrir des nouvelles relations avec les images représentées, quelles soient traditionnelles ou iconoclastes. Ce qui ressort avant tout de cette forme d’encadrement post- Brechtien des représentations de l’Acadie est une réaffirmation réfléchie de la conscience culturelle de l’Acadie moderne.
Throughout a long and remarkably productive career, Herménégilde Chiasson has remained adamantly connected to the Acadian community where he continues to reside and work. This personal experience is critical to his legitimate participation in the cultural affirmation of Acadia and his commitment to "une conscience [collective] qui origine à partir d'ici" ("Table ronde" 209). Later, in the same article, he measures the extent of his commitment in personal cost: "En ce qui me concerne, j'ai opté pour le succès de notre conscience collective, même si cela doit me coûter mon succès personnel" ("Table ronde" 215). It is also measured in the remarkable quantity and duration of his creative output. Over the past twenty-five years, more than twenty of his plays have been produced professionally. This impressive average of nearly one play per year for a quarter of a century is even more remarkable considering that during this same period Chiasson directed fourteen films, produced eighteen expositions of his visual art, and published eight collections of poetry.
This productivity, longevity, commitment to the cultural affirmation of his people, and motivation to "générer une conscience [collective] qui soit une conscience actuelle et moderne," underline the professionalism of Chiasson's dramaturgy ("Table ronde" 208). The dominance of works by Chiasson on the professional stages of Acadia over the past two and a half decades also contributes to this assessment. Andréï Zaharia, former artistic director of Théâtre Populaire d'Acadie and current head of the Département d'art dramatique at the Université de Moncton, recently noted in his address during the 25th anniversary of the Département that theatrical professionalism is at least as much a matter of the heart as of the wallet. That indeed the artist's personal commitment to quality is the primary determinant of a "professional." By all measures, Herménégilde Chiasson and his dramaturgy have been at the centre of the professional theatre in Acadia.
Chiasson's plays reveal a remarkable diversity in theme and form, including theatre for youth of different ages, musicals, historical dramas, contemporary domestic comedies, and surrealistic fantasies.1 Despite the diverse generic and thematic variety of his plays in which each piece is unique, all of his works share a fundamental commitment to the voices and images of modern Acadia. They also share important dramaturgical features which contribute to creating a powerful unity of vision in a dramaturgy as complex and contradictory as the society that Chiasson writes within.
Despite vast differences in details and particular approaches, all of Chiasson's plays on various levels of dramaturgy, content, and theme, consistently use auto-referential and metatheatrical techniques to force the audience into a self-conscious relationship with the images depicted, whether traditional or iconoclastic. The result of this kind of post-Brechtian self-conscious bracketing of representations of Acadia is a thoughtful awakening and reaffirmation of contemporary cultural consciousness in modern Acadia.
I feel that this position is a central motivation in Chiasson's dramaturgy. In a paper he presented to the Assemblé générale annuelle de la Fédération culturelle canadienne-française in June of 1996 entitled, "Comment traverser le tain de notre miroir pour atteindre le paradis de la visibilité," Chiasson explains at length the difficulty Acadian culture has in combatting the images produced by an externally-controlled media that often has an agenda contrary to the interests of Acadia. The real problem comes when Acadians themselves begin to suffer from the irreconcilable differences between the reality they are living and the images of themselves they begin to believe. As he explains,
Les Acadians domiciliés au Québec nous ont donné une image folklorique qui fait recette dans les médias et qui les a rendus visible sur le territoire de l'Acadia, au point où une grande majorité des Acadians s'identifie maintenant à cette vision exotique fondée beaucoup plus sur le mythe que la réalité. ("Comment traverser la tain" 10-11)
Chiasson's plays re-examine both the mythic images of Acadia and the ways these myths are created. By both performing the images and simultaneously bracketing these performances, a kind of double investigation is achieved that addresses his interest in generating a more acute sense of modern Acadian collective consciousness, and produces a dramaturgy of intense interest and broad appeal.
In virtually every one of his plays, Chiasson creates powerful bracketing effects through the insertion of non-dramatic, extra-narrative material that both highlights the dramatic elements and sets up powerful associative interpretations not obvious in more linear dramatic structures. This intertextualization involves incorporating music, songs, poems, speeches, historical documents, news reports, and other audio-visual material into the plays, sometimes in alternation with dramatic scenes, other times in multi-layered simultaneous juxtaposition. Some of these are actually borrowed citations, often identified as such, sometimes not. In other cases, the insertions are Chiasson's own creations, sometimes made to look like "borrowings." As a result, the boundaries between what is real and what is not are left blurred, just as the distinction between whether it is the insertions that are bracketing the drama or the other way around remains ambiguous. The point of the technique is to discourage simplistic, easy, and traditional interpretations by forcing the audience to consciously reconsider the tensions inherent in the relationships between the elements and the way they are constructed.
À vrai dire (1995), the play that depends the most extensively on this kind of borrowing, depicts a group of actors rehearsing an "evening of poetry" that is presented through a series of distinct sections, each containing a variety of scenes and presentations labelled numerically (Présentation 1, 2 etc), or by name of a poet (La poésie de Raymond LeBlanc, La poésie de Dyane Léger), or thematically (Révoltes et contestations, La langue, and Contradictions et quotidiens). Like a theatrical essay on contemporary Acadian poetry, it presents through taped and live readings multi-media images, dramatizations, an analytical performance of the poems, and the poets and the poetry of Acadia since 1972. The constant injecting of the poetry with enactments of events surrounding the writing of the poems (all set in the larger metatheatrical context of a "rehearsal") means that not only are the poems highlighted, but also the means by which the poetry has been created and the processes by which it is canonized are examined.
The relationship between events and the interpretation of these events is highlighted in several plays by the insertion of historical, literary, and audio-visual references. Speeches by Pascal Poirier and Monsignieur Richard are quoted extensively by actors portraying these historical figures in Renaissances; in Pour une fois, Charles Lanteigne discovers a blackened book in the basement of his burned-out home and quotes passages from it by Poirier again, as well as by Placide Gaudet. In these cases, the citations create a bridge between the mythos of the historic figures and the familiarity of contemporary situations by contextualizing the dramatization of historical moments, either directly, as in the portrayals of Poirier and Richard, or indirectly as in Charles's associative connection with and quotation of Poirier and Gaudet while enacting a scene reminiscent of and metaphoric for the Acadian expulsion.
Moreover, Renaissances and À vrai dire both use extracts from the well-known film l'Acadie l'Acadie. Here, the audience is put in the position of seeing both the famous film made about these historic protests and the depiction of a teen trying to explain to his father why he is protesting Moncton's moves to abolish French or a portrayal of the student protestors occupying the Université de Moncton. As constructed by the iconographic film, the myth is interplayed with dramatizations of the mythologized events. While the film presents a unified vision of glorified revolt, the scenes in the plays depict on-the-ground conflicts encountered by the agents of protest, whether between students with legitimately varying degrees of commitment or between the teen and his more careful and experienced father. In all these examples, the bracketing of dramatic scenes with other material encourages the audience to rethink not only the supposedly inherent validity of well-known mythic constructions, whether historical or modern, but also the process of the creation of these myths.
One of the most obvious and prevalent features of Chiasson's plays is his use of episodic dramatic structures that serve to undermine expectations of narrative linearity. Some are more obviously Brechtian in approach like Renaissances, which is composed of diverse and distantly-related scenes tracing the history of Acadian elite leadership since 1870 as a way of investigating the suggestion of a crisis in modern Acadian leadership. Setting and time shifts here are indicated only by changes in lighting, isolation of different acting areas, and musical transitions; in addition, the opening of the play features the actors out of character and outside the performing space debating (sometimes even with the audience) the historiographical significance of the play they are about to present. Other plays use the episodic structure more subtly. For example, L'exile d'Alexa depicts nearly continuous dramatic action in the home of Alexa and Marcel one evening. However, even in this apparently traditional linear structure, the sense of narrative flow is undercut by frequent switches between livingroom and bathroom settings punctuated by extensive monologues.
The key to understanding the importance of this resistance to linear narrativity can be found in Chiasson's most recent full-length play Pour une fois. Produced at the Théâtre l'Escaouette in November 1999, the episodic plot involving Charles Lanteigne and his family becomes a metaphor for the history of Acadia from its beginnings with Champlain through to an uncertain date in the (near?) future. However, the traditional story, clearly alluded to in the surtitles used for the episodes (like La découverte, La colonie, and La déportation), is completely subverted by the postmodern questionning of that story through the focus on the personal journey of Lanteigne and the mediatized framing scenes, which focus on the political future of Lanteigne's wife and the Parti Acadien. The traditional folkloric and linear story of Acadia is reconfigured through a more complex auto-referential depiction of modern realities in Acadian culture.
Chiasson devalues the genealogical/folkloric view of Acadia because he claims it is promoted by people who no longer participate in, or understand, the realities of modern Acadia, so it thus seriously hampers the development of a contemporary collective consciousness based on those realities: "C'est bien beau le discours folklorique et la diaspora, mais à moment donné, il va falloir autre chose que la généalogie pour qu'on s'affirme comme un peuple" ("Table ronde" 221). Both genealogy and folklore stress the linearity of the descent narrative and the hegemony of received interpretations of the past. These are then reinforced by a popular media whose simplifying tendencies numb Acadians' ability to perceive themselves (or have others see them) in realistic modern terms. Thus, Chiasson's dramaturgy is conceived to disrupt the sense of narrative expectations in order to open cultural space for a consciousness of modern Acadian collective reality.
One of Chiasson's most popular plays in recent years has been Laurie de la vie de galérie (1998), which has been remounted several times in the region and enthusiastically received by audiences. Structured around three acts that cover events spanning from early morning to late afternoon in a single day of the family of Laurie and Bénalda, the play appears to respect traditional linear form and the three unities of time, place, and action. However, the numerous short scenes between Laurie and his young friend, and soon-to-be son-in-law, Euclide, have minimal continuity, each dealing with unique aspects of the relationship between the two men and their views of the world. The two characters exhibit a long list of stereotypical habits, such as having little ambition other than rocking their days away on the front porch, keeping a constant supply of beer on hand, finding the best ways to get easy money, and waiting for their womenfolk to look after them. The only unifying factor are Euclide's songs, which interrupt the "action" at eight different points. The songs themselves, though, have only a tangential relationship to the action, sometimes picking up on a remark made during the scene, but often developing new ideas.
In addition, three unrelated and unexpected visitors arrive: Ella, the Radio-Canada journalist who wants to collect Acadian accents; Rebecca, an insurance investigator on the trail of Laurie's fraudulent disability claim; and finally, the municipal grass mower, who is engaged by an irascible neighbour to clear off the over-grown yard. These latter intrusions are thwarted by Laurie and none of the three has perceptible impact on later action. However, they do serve to further undercut the apparent linearity of the dramatic structure.
The interruptions, both dramatic and musical, create a self-conscious context for the central scenes, relieving the play from becoming simply a silly farcical representation of random Acadian clichés. Instead, the clichés are given an ironic twist by their interaction/contrast with the "irrelevant" outsider elements that end up having minimal impact on the unfolding of the main action. This internal bracketing of the stereotypes allows the audience to appreciate a good joke at its own expense, while the dramaturgical distance means the ability to laugh at oneself becomes an empowerment, not a humiliation. In other words, it is like being able to say, "Isn't it silly the way others see us, and aren't they silly for seeing us that way," instead of "Oh my god! How silly we look. I'm so ashamed." This subtle empowerment reinforces and is reinforced by the simple theme of the little guy prevailing against irrelevant outside oppressions. Laurie is the unheroic hero who holds at bay representatives of the government, financial institutions, and, with Euclide's help, manages to dupe an uninformed media by giving the reporter a folksong more "folksy" than she asked for.
Indeed, like Euclide's performance of the fake folksong that mixes "toutes sortes de mots de folklore qui font ni queue ni tête," but which the Montreal reporter finds "Merveilleux," the play as a whole becomes a complex representation of a "performance" of Acadia (Laurie 23). The clichés espoused by Laurie and Euclide because of their bracketed stage representation become "performances" of what others find "merveilleux" about Acadia, but which Acadians are empowered through humour to recognize as not real, as stereotypes conceived and promoted by outsiders with little sense or understanding of contemporary Acadia.
Among the earliest texts studied in this analysis was Chiasson's L'amer à boire (1976), which intriguingly dislocates two acts of a realistic family drama with a very surreal third act. The play initially depicts the Lanteigne family facing the crisis of Henri's recent unemployment. Conflicts centre around Rita's desire to move to greener economic pastures outside of Acadia versus her husband's devotion to remaining in the community despite the personal hardship. In addition, Rita's neurotic favoritism towards her eldest son, Armand, creates resentment in her other children, Henrietta and Eusèbe, and a sense of helplessness in her husband. These acts set up expectations of a traditional dramatic resolution focussing on the familial elements; however, the third act abruptly introduces a government office setting in which Armand now plays a bureaucrat with Henrietta as his secretary. Henri appears as a dispossessed landowner asking for reconsideration of his expropriation order. Eusèbe is a garage mechanic whom Armand attacks because he feels he has been charged too much on his repair bill. And Rita appears at the very end of the play in a Sagouine-like role as the office cleaning-lady.
The repositioned characters of the third act do not recognize each other even though they make reference to relationships that would appear to link them with their first and second act counterparts. For example, Rita, without acknowledging or recognizing Armand whose office she is cleaning, speaks of a son who is now a big-shot in a government office, her daughter who is a secretary, and the fact she and her husband have been paid to move from their home. Eusèbe is familiar as the mechanic in the first act who works "dans la graisse au garage à Pit Doucet" (L'amer à boire 21). The result is a very strange dislocation where the characters point to representations of themselves in earlier acts, yet resist mutual recognition. This structure means act III becomes a powerful antidote to the first part through the multilayered bracketing of the previous representations.
Through the characterization of Armand as the educated Acadian who leaves Acadia to work for the government on policies which rob his own people of their homes and land, there is the obvious and simplistic morality of the purported evils of straying outside the boundaries of Acadia and then betraying one's own people. This theme is well developed in I and II through the discussions between Henri and his wife, as well as Rita and Eusèbe, who are also committed to "rester cheu-nous pis d'pouvoir gagner not vie dans l'boutte sans awoir à s'exiler sus les Anglais" (L'amer à boire 20).
The negative outcomes of leaving are emphasized in the surreal third act with specific actions like Armand's mocking of local language skills, as demonstrated by Henrietta's "mistakes" in her typing. Likewise, Henri's love of "la belle terre" where "on a passé not' vie" is contrasted to Armand and the "sell-out" Acadian's bureaucratic disregard for land. The icons of front porch, beer, friends, and community are set against the office world of letters, phone calls, bosses, and "yes-men." If the play ended with this simple dichotomy, it would be little more than an odd propaganda piece, a modern morality play. However, the final scene moves it into a much more complex realm of metatheatre and cultural bracketing.
The image of the mother as La Sagouine, the well-known figure from Antonine Maillet's seminal play of the same name, has powerful symbolic significance for the Acadian audience. While the third act creates a kind of internal metatheatrical reflection, imperfect and distorted, of the first two acts, the entrance of Rita "sagouinisée" compounds this effect with intertextual reference to Maillet's iconographic character, expanding the symbolic field to include the broader cultural image. However, Rita/Sagouine (although she clearly refers to herself and the other characters from I and II) does not recognize them for who they really are in the present reality. They remain unacknowledged figments of her mythic memory, not members of a real contemporaneity. I suggest the key to understanding this is found in Chiasson's concern for the ability of Acadians to separate "la conscience moderne de l'Acadie" from "la conscience folklorique, généalogique traditionelle de l'Acadie," which he asserts in later essays and communications is largely a construction of ex-patriot Acadians outside the region ("Table ronde" 223). The inability of the characters to recognize themselves in the third act, compounded with La Sagouine's inability to express more than disconnected memory, is symbolic of this disparity in the collective consciousness Chiasson seeks to alleviate.
Through the metatheatrical reference to La Sagouine, the play becomes a representation of a representation of Acadia. This is a complex double self-reference to itself as theatre and to Acadia as a cultural construction. The foregrounded performance of symbols, both through the characters performing their own surreal futures as symbolic of their earlier political debates and through the interpretation of a Sagouine-as-mother figure as symbol of the dominant popular image of Acadia, brackets the theatrical images in a way that forces the audience to read them with a self-conscious detachment.
The importance of self-conscious detachment is also underlined by the prominent use of more obvious framing devices like prologues and epilogues in many plays that more literally "bracket" the main dramatic representation and are often used to double the representationalism of Chiasson's dramaturgy, forcing the audience into new relationships with the material being dramatized.
Chiasson uses this approach in Cap enragé (1992), which depicts the five days of Patrice Léger's incarceration and police questioning following the death of a friend at the cliffs of Cap enragé overlooking the Bay of Fundy. The gritty realism of the piece is developed despite an episodic dramatic structure consisting of scenes titled with dates and times and, occasionally, with subtitles that evoke a martial or political abstraction ("La manipulation," "La trahison," "La dernière bataille," and "L'échec"), underscoring the alienation felt by Patrice when faced with the judicial and law-enforcement culture of his jailers.
The overall realism of the play is also in contrast to the highly impressionistic, dreamlike, double prologue which introduces the play. The first scene of Cap enragé uses surreal lighting and recorded-sound overlay to set the mood by letting the audience overhear the police radio conversations on the night Patrice is taken into custody. The use of English by the police officers increases the alienation felt by the protagonist and situates the audience in direct relationship to the dislocation felt by the main character. This alienation is emphasized for the audience even more viscerally by the disorienting cacophony of sounds (ocean breakers, police dog, electric guitar solo, CB radio crackle), which bombard the spectators.
This brief sequence is followed by a scene actually labelled "prologue" for which the stage directions clearly indicate the desired "rêve éveillé" effect:
À tout bout de champ on entend une voix, c'est la voix de Victor [le policier] mais travaillée de manière électronique, une voix qui dit "Patrice Lèger, t'as un appel de ton père" suivi du son d'une grille qui s'ouvre. Sur un écran on projète l'image d'un homme dans la cinquantaine. On fait des fondus enchaînés de la même image si bien qu'on a l'impression qu'elle bouge. (Cap enragé 2)
The rest of the scene consists of Patrice's monologue recounting his reasons for being on the outs with his father; it is structured as if he were speaking to his father over the telephone and is intercut repeatedly by the line, "Patrice Lèger, t'as un appel de ton père." The reasons he gives for not wanting to talk to his father include the elder's lack of attention, his cowardly acceptance of the family's poor and marginalized conditions, and his violence within the family. Patrice concludes with a defiant statement to never "baiss[er] la tête," never be "excusé d'être en vie" (3). It is not hard to sense the Freudian aspects of this scene, as the father figure against whom Patrice is rebelling is overlaid by the older male police-officer, who will be Patrice's interrogator and nemesis throughout the play.
However, is Cap enragé ultimately really so "personal?" The reading of Patrice's defiance of authority, especially in light of his "jamais baissé la tête" line, easily symbolizes the defiance of a seemingly powerless Acadia facing powerful, external forces of authority. This collective symbolic reading is further suggested by the psychological underpinnings of Patrice's rebellion against the male authority figures in his life. Indeed, Chiasson himself develops a similar analogy in his essay "Comment traverser la tain...." Based on a series of ideas from Lacanian psychology, he interprets Acadia's relationship with Quebec in terms of the child, Acadia, having to pass through a period of resistance to, and rejection of, the father figure (the uncomprehending power centre) in order to achieve a balanced and whole sense of self. In Cap enragé, the question is not specifically or necessarily that of Acadia's relationship with Quebec alone, but rather Acadia's need to define herself on her own terms and regardless of what the external authority figures wish to impose, as Patrice succeeds in doing.
The episodic structure with subtitles encourages the audience to distance themselves from the immediacy of the realistic dramatic narrative, and this is compounded by the significantly contrastive theatrical prologue that introduces the symbolic and psychological underpinnings. These interconnected forms of theatrical bracketing allow Chiasson to engage his audience in the investigation of ambiguous power relationships, making the play not so much about a boy in jail, or even about Acadians' relationship with centres of authority, but rather a play about how social conditions and relationships are created, perceived, transformed, and become transformable.
In the history plays, the prologues and epilogues develop double-edged self-references as they deal with the obvious historical aspects of the plays, as well as with the historiographical questions raised by the acts of representation. The earliest and simplest example is the prologue of Histoire en histoire (1980) in which a public town-crier character "announces" the "telling" of the history of Nicolas Denys, a well-known founder of Acadia in the seventeenth century. The town-crier has to deal with the cynical actors/spectators who doubt the merits of such a telling in terms of its veracity ("histoire de menteries") and its relevance ("1598! Pourquoi pas 1982?"). He defends the performance/retelling by claiming that without a 1598, there would not be a 1982, and that history teaches how to "mieux comprendre notre présent." Thus, metatheatrical bracketing of the performance foregrounds the cross-over of historical narrative and contemporary reception. This is emphasized not only in terms of the causal connection between past events and present conditions, but also in terms of the impact of the rewriting/retelling of history itself.
The blending of historical and contemporary questions is compounded at various points in the play as actors ask further questions and interject odd anachronistic jokes, such as the pun on "la siège de la ville de La Rochelle" ("siège de bicycle" et "siège de toilette" 7-8). Likewise the metatheatrical emphasis on the "performance" of history is reinforced when the town-crier (and later narrator) stop the "action" to explain intervening events and when songs are used as transitions between scenes and acts. An accent is put on the portrayal of history as a narrative, like other stories that are created, told, and retold, instead of as a sort of immutable icon or identity. It is something that must be explored, questioned, replayed; it is in flux and more complex.
These elements are developed much further in the Brechtian-inspired Renaissances (1984), where the prologue, which takes place just outside the actual theatre ("sur le perron de l'église ... dans le lobby de la salle"), literally occupies the liminal space between the performance and the public. Likewise, the content of the prologue tries to bridge the worlds of history, as represented in the play, and contemporary society, as represented by the audience, through metatheatrically framing the historical depictions that follow in terms of the historiographical debates surrounding the re-tellings.
The actors, out of character, debate the issue of a crisis in Acadian leadership, coming down on either of two sides: it is all the fault of the English and the Acadians are helpless victims, or the Acadians are implicated in their condition and must take responsibility for their own success or failure. Underlining the lack of resolution to the debate, which nearly leads to violence among the actors, is the proposed ambiguity of historiographical reliability. The actors tease the audience by suggesting their "history" may be "la vérité" or "des menteries," a character "pourrait être Mgr. Richard" or "Ça pourrait être le père Lefebvre," the location "pourrait être Campbellton" or "Ça pourrait être Bathurst" among several examples (Renaissances 4-5). The implication is that the tellers are not in control of the events being told nor do they present themselves as holders of hegemonic wisdom. By first breaking the illusionary prestige of the space as performance and actor as character, Chiasson then pursues the destabilizing impact of the prologue by refusing to allow either closure of the principle theme or affirmation of even the basic act of retelling.
In this way, the audience is primed for the dramaturgical and thematic fluidity of the episodic units that compose the rest of the play. Twelve scenes of dialogue, which depict events from the 1860s to 1984, are separated by musical transitions, songs, monologues (including speeches quoted from historical figures and fictional news broadcasts), as well as audio-visual extracts from films and documentaries. The complexity of Chiasson's dramaturgical structure in this play is best exemplified by the sequence depicting the occupation of the Université de Moncton by student protestors in 1968. The scenes of the students ensconced in the occupied buildings are layered with footage of the film l'Acadie l'Acadie, musical extracts from the period, and the projection of another character's reportage of the students' trial in 1969.
The episodic and multi-layered metatheatricality of the sequences throughout the play work against the sense of continuity associated with the traditional narrative of history to create the basic dramatic tension in the text. This traditional narrative is frequently symbolized in the Acadian context by the question of genealogy, which is built into Renaissances by that fact, explained in the prologue, that all the characters are descended from the first Poirier couple depicted in the play. On the other side, the dramatic structure, as well as the generational and personal differences between characters, tends to negate the unifying expectations engendered by genealogy. The subliminal call for "racial" fidelity and cultural unity, significant premises of the genealogical impulse, is undercut by the individual realizations of each generation and individual.
One manifestation of this is the way the dominant theme of leadership is interpreted through the different periods of the play. The changing topics that relate to the crisis in leadership and its origins include over the years the role of industry in the region, the lure of emigration to the United Stages, the utility of an Acadian flag, the importance of religion and language, the management of Acadian schools, feminism, higher education, and the presence of secret societies like the infamous Patente. Chiasson confronts the stereotypical and simplistic images of Acadian identity by developing a free-ranging episodic play, which is able to demonstrate how even a question as central as that of leadership is fraught with complex variations and contradictions.
The closing frame of the play capitalizes on the thematic, dramaturgical, and cultural questions established by the prologue and subsequent episodes. Chiasson concludes Renaissances with a scene set as realistically as possible like a modern TV-panel interview featuring four spokespersons holding various positions on the question of a crisis in Acadian leadership. Stage directions suggest taping the sequence, using a well-known public affairs broadcaster as moderator. This could then be "broadcast" to the theatre audience on monitors around the auditorium. Chiasson is quite explicit about the purpose of this approach:
De cette manière on se rapproche dans le temps et dans l'espace puisque en principe la dernière scène a pour objet de relancer la question au spectateur, l'impliquer et lui signifier que le débat se poursuit et que lui le spectateur est au coeur de ce débat. (Renaissances 87)
Calling upon the visual vocabulary of ‘news' journalism, the scene reinforces complex interrelations between the performance and reality, building on Chiasson's penchant for dislocating the audience's received expectations, both dramaturgical and thematic. The actors whom the audience has already seen in and out of character roles now enact a "news" discussion about the theme of the scenes just witnessed. Therefore, it becomes a representation of a discussion about the ideas behind the representation of events depicted in the play. The positing of the media/news conceit in particular compounds the theatrical ‘bracketing' of the events developed through the episodic structure.
In Brechtian terms, the audience is explicitly re-engaged with the issues behind the drama through the framing epilogue which, in conjunction with the initial prologue and episodic structure throughout the play, interferes with the audience's passive reception of the drama. By being observers of the raw material and of the mediatized discussion, the audience is forced to confront their own relationship to the issues and their roots. The play then becomes not simply a portrayal of the leadership questions in Acadia, but also a theatrical investigation about how such questions are presented and thought about.
Through complex and persistent bracketing of cultural representations in the historical plays, Chiasson encourages the audience to reposition themselves in regards to the mythic elements in their self-image and to the way these images are constructed. The clichés of genealogy, the grandeur of famous political speeches and speakers, the reliability of historical narrative, the role of ‘expert' media commentary, even the prestige of traditional theatrical conventions are all called into question. It is essentially by way of non-linear theatrical structures that the play foregrounds the questioning of these elements and affords the audience the necessary distance to be able to perceive the differences between the reality of their existence and the arbitrariness of the fabricated clichés, indeed, apprehend the very process and faultiness of that fabrication.
Chiasson's own definition of an artist is "quelqu'un qui exprime la conscience d'une collectivité . . . j'assume mon rôle d'artiste qui est de traduire et de dire ce que les gens ressentent et ne disent pas. Souvent les choses sont vécues à l'état de symptômes et les artistes leur donnent une forme, un langage" ("Table ronde" 224). The professionalism of Chiasson's dramaturgy centres around his emphasis on self-conscious reformation of images and investigation of image making. He is not content to allow his audience to wallow comfortably in simplistic, traditional self-images, but works through his art to evoke a conscienceness of a modern Acadian collectivity. By utilizing multi-levelled metatheatrical bracketing through complex intertextualisation and episodic dramatic structures, Chiasson's plays undermine audience expectations of narrative linearity with its concomitant genealogical and folkloric premises. The disruption of narrative expectations thus creates the necessary space for renewed conscienceness of Acadian cultural realities.
Holding a mirror up to Acadian culture, Chiasson says, tends to reflect not what they are, but rather the image others have created for them. For Chiasson, the mirror must be remade, must show the looker not only the image reflected there, but also how that image has come about in order that a truer, more complex, modern Acadia can be seen. This is the reflective power of Chiasson's dramaturgy, a dramaturgy as complex, modern and multifaceted as Acadia herself.
NOTES
1. The plays of Herménégilde Chiasson used in this analysis include the following: L'Amer à boire (TPA, 1976); Histoire en histoire (l'Escaouette, 1980); Mine de Rien (l'Escaouette, 1980); Cogne-Fou (l'Escaouette, 1981); L'Étoile de Mine de Rien (l'Escaouette, 1982); Évangéline, mythe ou réalité (L'Escaouette, 1982); Atarelle et les Packmaniens (l'Escaouette/CNA, 1983, Michel Henry éditeur, Moncton: 1986); Renaissances (l'Escaouette, 1984); Y'a pas que les maringouins...dans les campings (l'Escaouette, 1986); L'Amour fou (l'Escaouette, 1988); Eddie (Productions Océans, 1989); Pierre, Hélène et Michael (L'Escaouette / CNA, 1990); Cap Enragé (l'Escaouette, 1992); Le Manège des anges (l'Escaouette / CNA, 1993); l'Exil d'Alexa (l'Escaouette, Éditions Perce-neige, 1993); La Vie est un rêve (l'Escaouette, 1994); À vrai dire (l'Escaouette, 1995); Aliénor (l'Escaouette, Éditions d'Acadia, 1998); Laurie ou la vie de galerie (TPA / l'Escaouette, 1998); Pour une fois (l'Escaouette, 1999).
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WORKS CITED
Chiasson, Herménégilde. "Traversée." Tangence 58 (1998)
—. "Table ronde sur l'identité et la création culturelles en Acadia." Revue de l'Université de Moncton 27.2 (1994)
—. "Comment traverser le tain de notre miroir pour atteindre le paradis de la visibilité," site Internet de la Galerie d'Art de l'Université de Moncton, visité le 15 avril 2000 http://www.umoncton.ca/gaum/findex.html