ALVINA RUPRECHT
In the Spring of 2001, Denis Marleau, artistic director and founder of the Théâtre Ubu (Montreal), became artistic director of French theatre at the National Arts Centre, after performing his plays on all the most important European stages. This interview, the first one he gave upon assuming his new position in Ottawa, tries to establish the general orientation of Marleau's future artistic choices in relation to his own creative work and the programmes he will present at the National Arts Centre (NAC). The interview moves towards Marleau's own research on Modernity through theatre practice, especially as it appears in Maeterlinck's symbolist theatre. He also discusses his staging of Catoblépas, a performance based on a text by Gaëtan Soucy that was presented at the "Theatre Festival of the Americas" in Montreal, May 2001.
Après avoir fréquenté les théâtres les plus prestigieux de l'Europe, Denis Marleau, directeur artistique et fondateur du Théâtre Ubu (Montréal), est devenu directeur artistique du Théâtre français au Centre national des Arts (CNA). Cet entretien, le premier qu'il ait accordé depuis qu'il a assumé son nouveau poste, essaie de cerner l'orientation possible de ses choix artistiques, choix qui auront des répercussions importantes à la fois sur la programmation du CNA. et sur ses propres recherches scéniques. La discussion met en relief l'intérêt que porte Marleau sur la Modernité au théâtre, surtout en tant que manifestation de l'esthétique symboliste don't l'oeuvre de Maurice Maeterlinck serait le représentant le plus intéressant. Il s'agit également de Catoblépas, une oeuvre réalisée à partir du texte de Gaëtan Soucy, présentée au "Festival des Amériques" à Montréal en mai 2001.
Denis Marleau, artistic director of the Théâtre Ubu in Montreal, became the new director of French Theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on December 1, 2000. Following on the heels of André Brassard, Robert Lepage, and Jean-Claude Marcus, Marleau will be responsible for preparing the French theatre season. He has also set himself the task of encouraging French-language companies to produce new works for the nation's capital. And as the NAC mandate stipulates, he will make decisions concerning the NAC involvement in co-productions with French language companies from Quebec and elsewhere. Marleau occupies a special place in the annals of Quebec theatre history because of his unique stage experiments with modernist aesthetics. His interest in Symbolism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, the Bauhaus, and in contemporary German theatre has led to memorable productions of works by Picasso (Désir attrapé par la queue), Jarry (Ubu and a series of Ubu related collages), Queneau (Exercices de Style), Kurt Schwitters (Merz Opera), as well as Wedekind (Lulu), Bernhard (Maîtres anciens), Buchner (Woyzek), and a musical creation by Mauricio Kagel (La Trahison orale). More recently, he has staged a play by Tabucchi based on the multiple creative voices of Portuguese writer Fernando de Pessoa. He also created his own version of Faust.1 He has performed across Europe, and he has been invited by the Festival of Avignon to inaugurate the festival in the Cour d'honneur.2 Alvina Ruprecht chatted with Marleau on the eve of his entering the halls of the National Art Centre. She was curious about the effect these new responsibilities might have on his creative energy and on the general experimental focus of his stage productions.
AR. The first memories I have of you and your company go back to 1985 when I saw your production of Picasso`s play Desire Caught by the Tail staged (Le désir attrapé par la queue) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, in the context of the Picasso retrospective. I remember how pleasantly surprised I was to see that here was someone who understood the spirit of this surrealist stage experiment so well.
DM. Actually, that staging was part of my on-going exploration of the Avant-Garde movements. I continued in that vein with works by Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, and others. My relationship with art galleries has always been important because my own Théâtre Ubu got its start with Coeur à Gaz and other Dada texts presented at the Gallery of Contemporary art in 1981.3 That show was revived by the Théâtre de Quat'sous and that new staging launched my exploration of these forms of marginal theatre.
AR. Will your new administrative responsibilities allow you continue your "rediscovery" of the Avant-garde?
DM. Actually my stage work has taken on all sorts of new directions. The last performance I did in this same vein was not seen by the Quebec public because it was done for the George Pompidou Center in Paris. Merz Variétés (Kurt Schwitters)4 was commissioned for a Kurt Schwitters retrospective organised with the support of the Goethe Institute. I based it on a selection of new texts using seven actors: six Québécois and one French actress. Unfortunately, the show did not go beyond Paris because the actors were already engaged elsewhere. I just mention this to show you that this kind of theatre is constantly present in my mind. It informs everything I do. Since that period, I have also worked on contemporary dramatists from Koltès to recent Québécois writers Gaëtan Soucy and Normand Chaurette. And I intend to continue working in this direction. German writers [such as Bernhard, Wedekind and Buchner] have always fascinated me as well.
AR. The modernist aesthetic, which was so much part of your work at the beginning, is still, therefore, very much present in your stage research.
DM. That's right. And that manifests itself by my interest in plays made up of textual fragments. For example, Woyzek is a play that is always recreated from its many versions because Buchner wrote several versions of that work. In fact, the Woyzek I staged could also be called a completely new Woyzek since it consisted of Buchner`s text reassembled and reorganized in a particular way.
AR. That production appeared very minimalist; it almost became an abstraction, reduced to a series of concepts . . .
DM. . . . which was almost a heresy in relation to the German staging of the play.
AR. Quite. But it was interesting precisely for that reason. So, you do not intend to return to your avant-garde experiments in the context of your NAC mandate?
DM. Oh yes I do, but I don't know yet how that will come about. I am still interested in the question of modernity and its sources in the theatre. It exists at so many levels in theatrical texts, as well as in the visual conceptions of a staging. For example, I haven't yet touched the Italian Futurists. I have already worked on Maiakowsky, the Russian Futurist, but I have never done anything with Marinetti, the head of the Futurist movement responsible for the famous Manifesto of 1909. I would love to stage his work one of these days and then do a Futurist Cabaret. These Cabarets are the real fathers of performance art and founders of the contemporary installation. That is the sort of thing that interests me. There is also Expressionist theatre that is not known here. There is a great body of that literature which is never performed: plays by Georg Kaiser, by Karl Sternheim. His play Büger Schippel, for example. Those are rarely performed master pieces.
AR. And you would do them in the stage aesthetics of the period?
DM. No. I don't ever recreate the aesthetics of a period. I try to understand this aesthetic and to see how it can enter into a dialogue with our contemporary way of perceiving theatre. When I say a dialogue, I literally mean a dialogue. I don't intend to imitate a form, to create a museum piece. That is not want I'm looking for.
AR. Nevertheless, I did have the impression that you followed some of Jarry's ideas very closely, especially when he speaks of the "inutility of theatre in the theatre," when he speaks of marionettes, of a certain style of performance that would eliminate the "natural" presence of the actor in the wake of the symbolist movement.
DM. Yes. In spirit, but not literally. Of course, you are referring to my use of marionettes and the effigy. In Les Ubs (The Ubus), for example, le texte was a collection of fragments where I even added some of Jarry's poetry. I shifted scenes. I moved rapidly to a condensed version of Ubu enchaîné (Ubu Chained). Those are the kinds of changes I made within the text in order to recreate the work, but my motives were not academic; I did not try to stage the work the way it was done when it was first produced. I am much more interested in discovering things. For example, I wanted to find out what inspired the artists of that period, their aesthetic principles, their philosophy, the vision of the world that guided their creativity. I would like to see if there are parallels with those ways of seeing today.
AR. Are there any present-day playwrights or authors who inspire this kind of reflection or who offer you the possibilities for new research in the theatre.
DM. Not that many. I have the impression that the problems that confronted the theatre in the past are still the same. For example, the fact there is a theatre based on a tradition which refuses to go beyond the representation of reality, a theatre which creates a mirror effect, a naturalistic theatre.
AR. Is that still the case in Quebec?
DM. Yes. You still find that tendency in Quebec, in the acting, in the way certain practitioners approach their work. Naturalism is still a strong influence. But there is another form of theatre which feeds on the imagination, on language, on recreating the world. I am particularly interested in playwrights who reinvent language. That is why I have a good relationship with Normand Chaurette. He creates his own language. On the other hand, there is still a whole body of Quebec theatre where language functions as a means of staging social relationships. More recently, I have been working with a new author, Gaëtan Soucy, whose first play, Catoblépas, will open at the National Arts Centre during this season. When I read his novel, The Little Girl Who Liked Matches, I realized this was exquisite writing. A new language had been created.
AR. Your research also involves the material and the visual aspects of the stage.
DM. Of course. The theatre that interests me is an art form that allows me to conjugate meaning in the text with visual effects and elements of sound. For the moment, I am working on Maeterlinck's first play, Intérieur (Interior).5
AR. Didn't Maeterlinck write his first plays for marionettes because the presence of the actor went against the meaning of the symbol. In fact, Mallarmé and the symbolists objected to theatre for that reason.
DM. That's right. But Maeterlinck is an extraordinary playwright whom people here hardly know. His play, Intérieurs, takes 20 minutes to read and we have turned it into a 75 minute performance. His is a theatre of silence, of slow motion. But it isn't an ethereal symbolism; it is very concrete. It's about the tragedy of everyday life. With this staging, I am in the process of discovering works that foretell the theatre of Beckett
AR. And Pinter?
DM. Yes, absolutely. These are all writers for whom silence is a creative instrument. Silence can be used in many ways; it can be a wall, an echo, sometimes it resonates. The sound scape in this play is based on music by Denis Gougeon. The sound effects in general and sound design are by Nancy Tobin. The actors perform wearing cordless microphones. They whisper their texts.
AR. What about the corporeal part of the staging?
DM. To explain that, I'll just give you a resumé of the story. It concerns an old man and a foreigner who find themselves in a garden facing a family supposedly in their house. It is spring and it is about 9:00 p.m. The elderly man has the cruel task of informing the family of the death of their little girl, who has possibly taken her own life. The play unfolds in real time, and it is a series of hesitations. This is the tragedy of everyday life. The family on stage doesn't utter a word, but we can see that they live a normal life. The older man, on the other hand, knows what has happened, and he knows that the news is going to upset the family. So the emotion is highly charged with silences, with hesitations, and with interminable pauses. This man is confronted with the cosmos and with the human tragedy, all expressed through the terrible news which must be told. The actual tragedy has already taken place, and now he has to say it. It is the anticipation of "how to say it" which drives this play and which foretells the theatre of Beckett. For me personally, it is a challenge to work with four characters who don't say a word, the members of the family who are supposed to be inside the house. I decided that my staging would integrate the interior and the exterior into one single space. Now to come back to the question about staging the body. There is a general corporeal choreography based on gestures, as well as on the musical orchestration. Gabriel Gascon plays the elderly man and Gregory Hlady, a Ukranian actor presently living in Montreal, plays the foreigner. Together we have uncovered numerous creative possibilities in Maeterlinck's text. For me, the creative process is very important. We have been workshopping this text for about a year. Stéphanie Jasmine, my colleague as well as my literary and artistic adviser, attended a conference on Maeterlinck at Cérisie Lasalle (France), and she returned with a wealth of information on this writer. That is why I like the theatre so much; it becomes a place where knowledge is exchanged, where people meet and information circulates.
AR. What I see, then, is that working here will not at all force you to change your own special form of theatre. However, do you feel that the Ottawa public is ready for you and for the kind of theatre you do? Do public expectations create pressure? Do you have any misgivings about that?
DM. That question was not discussed. But as an artist, I could not stand pressure of that kind. For the moment, I have to acquaint myself with the realities of the institution (NAC), which I already know to some extent because Théâtre Ubu has played here several times before. I am also beginning to prepare next year's program. I think that one of the important tasks at hand is to bring theatre production back to the NAC. That will be my main task for the moment. That is something I cannot do with Théâtre Ubu because my own theatre functions independently. But I can do that in Ottawa. For example, I will be in close contact with other theatre practitioners, other companies and I will encourage them to work in Ottawa part of the time or all of the time. That is the part of my mandate, which interests me in particular. It means that my work in Ottawa will be complementary to my own work with Théâtre Ubu. However, I would like to bring out the creativity of others without intervening directly in their work. Of course, I will be watching and paying attention to the theatre in the Ottawa-Hull area, to the work of people like Robert Bellefeuille, for example. Obviously it is part of my function to direct my own plays, and so I will do stagings for the NAC from time to time, but not immediately.
The productions will rehearse in Montreal because you know the problem: actors cannot travel or live elsewhere for periods of two or three months while they are engaged in a production. And since they come from Montreal, rehearsals must take place in Montreal. We will spend the final two weeks in Ottawa. That is how we have arranged our time for Catoblépas, the play by Gaëtan Soucy.
AR. Will you settle in Ottawa?
DM. Yes. I have an apartment here, but I will go back and forth as I have been doing for a long time. These last years I have been moving between Montreal, Paris, and Avignon, spending a lot of time in Europe. Now I no longer have to prove myself; I don't feel the need to stage plays in any of the great theatre centres of the world. After my play opened the Avignon Festival (see note 1), I started to think about my life and I came to the conclusion that I wanted to work more closely with Canadian and Quebec artists. That is why I began to develop a project to build a production centre at the Hermitage in Montreal. That would allow me to work in situ, as it were. In Montreal, there is a lack of rehearsal space. For example, when we were rehearsing Urfaust, we had to change our rehearsal sites four times during that period and it was very disruptive. Given the demands I make on the text, on the actors, and on the material requirements of the production, I need my own space. And we found the perfect space in the Hermitage. In the forties and fifties, CBC Radio Canada used the theatre there as a concert hall. Paul-Emile Borduas had his first ‘Automatiste' showings in the theatre of the Hermitage. Alfred Pellan created his famous staging of La Nuit des rois (Twelfth Night) in the Hermitage Gardens. The Compagnons de Saint Laurent6 rehearsed there before moving to the Gésu, the TNM performed there, so did Glen Gould. This hall of 600 seats has accommodated many important guests. We have used that space for rehearsals. And along with Ginette Laurent's group, O Vertigo Danse, we are presently in the process of negotiating with the Ministry of Culture and the Sulpiciens to obtain the building as part of a project to revitalise the cultural and the artistic activity in that space. We hope to create a laboratory where we would be able to create our own productions and then move them off to other places. That would be important for my own productions and for those of foreign artists invited to collaborate with us.
AR. It is ironical that you have a company, but you are seeking a performance space. Whereas the space exists in Ottawa, but we lack a company.
DM. That's the way things happen. In any case, I am very happy with this turn of events. I am 45 years old and I want my creative work to be inscribed in a particular space. I am not a nomad. The creative process is important for me. I have the impression that generally speaking present day theatre is not interested in process, but aims exclusively at a finished product. Creators want a well-crafted object that will seduce the public at any cost. And that brings up the broader question of mass culture.
AR. And of the commodification of culture. But coming back to the idea of process, I remember that when Robert Lepage was responsible for French theatre at the NAC, we sometimes had the distinct impression that the process took over and that the performances became laboratory experiments where the director tested different ideas in front of the audience. Given those conditions, we realized that often the real premières took place in Montreal or elsewhere when the general conception of the work was clearer. I must admit, that did bother me. I felt we were being used somehow.
DM. Lepage and I don't work the same way. For me, theatre is a brutal art. There is a première, and after that, I rarely intervene. The process stops there. I need a certain period of time in which to try out different approaches through workshops and meetings. I need to exchange ideas with literary advisors, especially if I am working on the adaptation of a text. You mustn't leave the public adrift. You must provide a context to help understand a play. During the run of the play, there must be encounters with the audience so that they understand the ‘how' and ‘why' of this work of art created for their enjoyment. For that reason, my programs are always well researched, full of information, documents to help the spectator navigate though my performance. Artists must get involved with the public because that is the way one develops an audience. That kind of activity is one of my priorities.
AR. And the next season?
DM. We depend very much on what is available. I am currently studying all the proposals that we have received. My first season will give me the chance to contact a variety of theatre people, and I have to acquaint myself with those who are available because I will be around for five years. As for my own preferences, what I like most about other theatre directors is the kind of theatre that I myself cannot do. One person comes to mind, for example: Mathias Langhoff, artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. I find his theatre fascinating because he works in an atmosphere of chaos.
AR. It would be wonderful if you could bring in companies from outside the country.
DM. Yes. I hope to do just that. I feel I owe it to other companies as well because I myself have been so well treated, even spoiled by the European theatre milieu that always welcomed me with open arms. One is often more of a stranger in one's own house than in someone else's. As for the new season, I will try to maintain a certain continuity, but the choices will be my own. In any case, I feel that people will not be disappointed. We have 4000 subscribers and I know that my personal choices will be obvious. I am trying to find plays that will interest the general public, the theatre milieu, the NAC, and the artists themselves. But then we all have the same interests at heart. Don't we all come together here to celebrate theatre, a creative event of the utmost importance?
And the celebration that Marleau promised will certainly materialize next season on the NAC stage where we will see his own choices representing not only some of the best productions of the 2000-2001 season from Montreal, but also representing Marleau's predilection for well-written texts and stagings that are very different from his own. We will see Robert Lepage's stage magic in his most recent solo performance, La face cachée de la lune.7 We will see productions of contemporary and less contemporary classics: Marivaux's La double inconstance staged by André Brassard; Ted Spychalski will direct a work by German writer Tankred Dorst, Moi, Feuerbach. Spychalski is one of the co-founders of the Groupe de la Veillée, which is based, at its origins on the principles of Jerzy Grotowski, with whom the other co-founder, Gabriel Arcand, trained for many years. This company is devoted to European classics presented in very contemporary stagings. Marleau's other choices include Daniel Panneton and Paul Buissonneau's reworking of Jean Tardieu's Théâtre de Chambre, which has not been seen in Quebec since 1979.
Also, we will have the meeting of theatre and cinema, as two filmmakers move from the screen to the stage, which is an important new development. François Girard, who created The Red Violin, remains in the realm of music with his staging of Novecento, a one-man performance about a pianist by Italian playwright Alessandro Baricco. Then, Pierre Perrault's staging of Au coeur de la rose will bring us into the poetic world of nature that Perrault's cinema has always captured. Réjean Ducharme's new work called l'Hiver de force will have Lorraine Pintal, artistic director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, working with Monique Mercure, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Alexis Martin, Pierre Curzi, Mari Tifo, Céline Bonnier, and Brigitte Lafleur. Also coming is a new production written, staged, and acted by Wajdi Mouawad and Estelle Clareton, a work produced with the support of the International Carrefour Theatre Festival of Quebec City and the Théâtre de Quat'sous of which Mouawad is the artistic director. The season begins with "24 poses" (portraits), a text by Serge Boucher (author of the prize winning play Motel Hélène, which premièred in 1997), directed by René Richard-Cyr and produced by the Compagnie Jean Duceppe.
As Marleau suggested in his interview, he has chosen a season that makes absolutely no concessions to Ottawa audiences. However, to bridge any gaps and to prepare his public for what they are about to see, Marleau has created Les Cahiers du théâtre français (French Theatre Review). The bi-annual publication from the NAC will be made available to all subscribers. As he mentions in the interview, documents of this kind are essential to help an audience understand what the director and the playwright are trying to do. The editor of this new publication will be Paul Lefebvre, Marleau's new assistant artistic director, critic, translator, director, teacher, and formerly artistic director of the Salle Fred-Barry, a small experimental space in the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier. Also for the past year, M. Lefebvre has been artistic director of Teesri Duniya Varma, a company founded to explore intercultural relations.
Marleau has added two new initiatives to the season. First of all, he has created a programme of guest artists who will be invited in during the year and will have carte blanche and be asked to direct a play of her choice for next years season. The other one is an exploration workshop for the development of theatre professionals in the Ouataouas region. The workshops will be based on the "master class" model and will be lead by internationally known creators or performers who are doing the kind of exploratory work that interests Marleau. His first guest next season will be André Markowicz, a Czech writer and translator of Russian texts into French. His works have started a revolution in this area because he affirms that the plays of Chekhov and other Russian writers have been badly distorted by western translators. He wants to rediscover the authenticity in these stage voices. Markowicz will not only be responsible for the workshops, but he will be taking part in activities in the Theatre Department of the University of Ottawa and in the Université de Hull (UQAH). Marleau's season, then, is true to his word. His desire is to develop audiences, to watch the growth of the local theatre scene, to encourage the creation of new works, and to bring audiences here close to the European theatres that have embraced his own work with open arms. Ottawa is so very lucky to have Denis Marleau at the NAC. Now all we can do is sit back, watch this new world of theatre unfold before us, and enjoy it.
NOTES
1. Les trois derniers jours de Fernando Pessoa (1997), and Urfaust, tragédie subjective, (1999). Urfaust is based on an adaptation that brings together Goethe's and Pessoa's readings of Faust. This co-production with theatres from Montréal, France and the NAC in Ottawa, was presented in Montréal, Weimar, Berlin, Munich, Sceaux, Bourges, Meylan, Limoges, and Ottawa.
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2. In 1996, Marleau's staging of Le passage de l'Indiana by Normand Chaurette at the Avignon Festival drew attention to his work and he was invited the following year (1997) to present Lessing's Nathan le Sage in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes.
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3. In January, the Montreal Gallery of Contemporary Art announced that Denis Marleau was named artist-in-residence, and that he would be creating a new performance based on a text by Maeterlinck.
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4. A coproduction of the Théâtre Ubu and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, January 8-18, 1995.
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5. Intérieur was presented at the Rideau Vert (Montreal) in January, 2001. See Alvina Ruprecht, "Intérior. Denis Marleau and Symbolist Theatre," http://www.ottawa.cbc.ca/cbom/theatre
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6. Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent, (1937-1952), founded by Père Legault, was the first professional theatre company in Quebec. Influenced by the experiences of Jacques Copeau and his pupils, who came to be known as the Cartel des Quatre (Baty, Dullin, Jouvet et Pitoëff), Legault wanted to stage French classical theatre (Molière, Racine, Shakespeare), as well as contemporary classics (Lorca, Claudel, Cesbrun, Cocteau, Labiche, Williams, Eliot, Pirandello, de Musset, P. Emmanuel, and more), a repertoire unheard of in Quebec at that period. The members of his company, young unknown actors at that time, went on to become pillars of Quebec theatre: Jean Gascon, Gabriel Gascon, Georges Groulx, Guy Hoffman, Hélène Loiselle, Jean-Louis Roux, and Guy Provost among others.
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7. Lepage will also be presenting this performance in English for the English language theatre program.
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