ALVINA RUPRECHT
This article outlines the trajectory of the Theatre Research Workshop l'Eskabel (1971-1989), an experimental performance group, founded by Jacques Crête. Although the company was marginalized in Quebec, its research on the relationship between corporeal performance, Catholic ritual and sexual identity was the result of a synthesis of Quebec's avant-garde, of experiments in ritual theatre during the 1960s, and of the postmodern upheaval of identity-categories. The author hopes to show how this group was in fact one of the keys to more recent movements in Quebec theatre.
Cet article suit le trajet de l'Atelier de recherche théâtrale l'Eskabel (1971-1989), une communauté libertaire d'artistes marginalisés, fondée par Jacques Crête. Grâce à sa recherche sur les rapports entre le processus du jeu, la thérapie de groupe, l'identité sexuelle et la dynamique de la Messe, cette compagnie, qui s'alimentait des expériences automatistes, des recherches rituelles des années 1960 et de la réflexion post-moderne sur l'instabilité des catégories sexuelles, est devenue une des expériences-clés du renouveau théâtral au Québec.
One day in July 1971, at the McGill University summer school in Montreal, a frail bearded man with long hair, wearing sandals and a flowing Middle Eastern robe, stood in front of an astonished group of professors and students who had come to hear a lecture on recent tendencies in Quebec theatre. What they heard and saw instead was an impassioned performance by Jacques Crête, reading his manifesto Propos sur le théâtre, announcing the coming of a new age through the theatre. This event, in the context of this article, can be seen to parallel the famous 1933 conference where Antonin Artaud, in front of an audience of professors, students and theatre professionals at the Sorbonne, incarnated the encounter of theatre and plague which was to have a profound influence on theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. (Nin 277-8) Crête, influenced by Artaud as well as his "fils naturels" (Virmaux 267) Grotowski,2 Peter Brook3 and Julian Beck,4 proclaimed on that day the beginning of a unique theatrical adventure that lasted until 1989--the Eskabel Workshop of Theatre Research (L'Atelier de recherche théâtrale L'Eskabel). Crête's group--or "communitas"5 of artists--represented the first organized manifestation in Quebec of a post-Artaudian ritual theatre, filtered through Crête's own personal re-reading of the corporeal training of Grotowski, Arthur Janov's primal scream therapy,6 and the writings of Artaud. This long-lived experiment has been relegated to a passing mention in the annals of Quebec theatre history; it nevertheless had a profound effect on a small group of artists who rejected the nationalist and socio-political orientations that dominated Quebec theatre during this time. In fact, Crête's notions of theatre went against everything that was taking place in Quebec at the time.7 This article attempts to pinpoint some of the characteristics of the Eskabel's ex-centric vision of theatre--more precisely, the company's particular re-reading of the body throughout the various stages of its visual and corporeal aesthetics, as it set out to cure the "sickness" of artists marginalized because of their ideological or sexual differences.
In order to fully understand the impact of Jacques Crête's dissident theatre company and the nature of his interest in ritual performance, one has to realize that the province of Quebec did not live through the counter-culture movements of the 1960s in the same way that they were experienced in the United States. During this decade Quebec was going through a profound process of self- awareness as a French-speaking entity politically and culturally distinct from the European Metropolitain French culture, as well as from the surrounding North American reality. Symptomatic of this movement was the 1968 revolt by the students of the National Theatre School in Montreal, protesting a curriculum that, according to them, neglected Québécois dramatists and imposed an actor's training programme dominated by the ideas of Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin, and continental playwrights--all of whom were seen as too "French" and even too "classical." (Germain 9-19)
In the political arena, the October Crisis exploded in 1970. Suspected activists were arrested as the army occupied the province; events came to a head with the assassination of Pierre Laporte, a member of the Provincial Liberal government. As a backlash, a wave of cultural activism penetrated all creative activity, including the theatre. Artists expressed a militant opposition to the Federal presence and, by extension, everything related to the Anglophone-dominated culture of the Canadian Federation. At the same time, they also rebelled against European French artistic models, whose very presence exacerbated the notion that Québécois writers and artists were somehow inferior to their European counterparts. Artists found themselves involved in what was seen as an anti-colonial struggle for a specific Quebec identity. Consequently, theatre whose content incorporated the Quebec political reality--works by writers and stage practitioners such as Françoise Loranger, Michel Tremblay, Jean Claude Germain, and theatre collectives such as le Théâtre Euh, le Grand Cirque Ordinaire--became the predominant expression of cultural dissidence in Quebec, the new counter-culture of the 1970s.
In the United States, on the other hand, the counter-culture movements were not waging an anti-colonial war for the definition of a national American culture. These movements were protesting against the Western bourgeois culture responsible for the racist war in Vietnam, and they drew their models from non-Western cultures. The dissident movements sought not to affirm an authentic American culture but to change American society by transforming reality, almost as the Surrealists would have wished to do. For many theatre practitioners, therefore, Artaud's text Le Théâtre et son double (in particular the first chapter "Le Théâtre et la culture") was the inspiration for a form of change that paralleled non-Western rituals. Within the context of such Euro-American ritual-theatre, the performance was perceived as a process of transfiguration producing physical and psychic change that would produce a new consciousness, a state of "translumination" (in Grotowski's terms). This psycho-physiological process was at the source of the collective healing rituals through which Grotowski guided his actors in his Wrozclaw atelier in the 1960s.8 He found much of his inspiration in the mystery of Catholic ritual, which functioned in similar ways.
In Quebec, however, Artaud, Grotowski and even Peter Brook were almost unknown to the cultural dissidents of the 1960s and 70s. The militant atmosphere encouraged performances that had either a didactic function aimed at socio-political change, or a mirroring function which reinterpreted and confirmed a familiar world. Quebec practitioners were interested in Brechtian didactic techniques, stand-up comic monologues, circus techniques, marionettes, acrobatics, mime, commedia dell'arte improvisation techniques, Piscatorian agit-prop--in general, any form of popular expression.
In this atmosphere, then, Jacques Crête and his company l'Eskabel, whose members rejected the cultural values and categories embodied in the call for national unity--values which stifled their creativity--were marginalized. Crête also rejected all forms of popular theatre where joual, the local language, became a sign of national expression. In keeping with American and European ritual-theatre practitioners, Crête instead sought out models which would allow him to distance himself from his local origins. Conversations with Crête9 about his personal life make it quite obvious that this aversion to his own society was partly the result of his homosexuality, which brought him much grief within the narrow-minded and ultra-conservative milieu of La Pointe-du-Lac near Trois Rivières, where he grew up. Fleeing the "vulgar uncultured" milieu around him, Crête settled in Montreal in 1963, and chose to involve himself in all those activities that went against the status quo sexually, politically--and theatrically. He enrolled in a private acting school, took lessons in classical diction and voice, and sought closer contact with the same original sources of French culture that were rejected by the Quebec anti-colonialist and more secularized dissident movements of the 1970s. Among these sources were the classical texts of Greek and French theatre, as well as liturgical drama and its main ritual of transfiguration--the Mass. Crête also met Pierre Larocque at this time, and entered into a productive but stormy liaison that was to structure the first part of his theatrical adventure (1971-79).
One of the most striking aspects of the Eskabel experience, then, is that it embodied a moment of transition in Quebec theatrical history, where three apparently contradictory tendencies converged. First of all, it echoed the Quebec avant-garde experiments of the 1950s characterized by the "Automatiste" movement, a form of Surrealism which cultivated the anti-rational process of "écriture automatique" by calling up the "pulsion créatrice," the creative spark, the pure impulse of spontaneous kinetic creative energy.10 In this context, marginalized artists such as Claude Gauvreau subverted existing stage conventions by imposing a denaturalized body on stage that spoke an invented language that Gauvreau called "la langue exploréenne,"11 floated through walls,12 and reflected the workings of the subconscious. Crête had worked closely with Claude Gauvreau as a member of the cast in the first production of Gauvreau's play, La Charge de l'orignal épormyable. (Gauvreau 20-37) In addition, the Eskabel reflected the already-mentioned ritual-theatre movement of the 1960s, which sought to renew theatrical convention through non-secular traditions. In this context the actor became the undifferentiated site of a spiritual quest, and the rehearsal and performance a search for a "universal essence" attained through a psychophysiological experience that transcended all forms of ethnic, racial, moral or sexual specificity.13
At odds with these two clear influences, the Eskabel performance exemplified a post-modern rejection of a "universal essence." The actor's body became the site of a ritual transformation that constructs identities through individual cultural, moral and sexual choices, based on sliding, unstable categories. In the Eskabelian view of things, identities were constantly redefined in the performance space by the complex relations among the actors, and between the actors, the public and the stage aesthetics. Crête's theatre brought together the personal lives of his performers with these multiple stage strategies, in an uneasy compromise. Beginning as a rereading of corporeal theatre's body poetics, and in particular Grotowski's notion of the via negativa subjected to the dynamics of counter-culture group therapy, the Eskabel theatre moved through a period of militant gay aesthetic, which could be characterized as "flamboyant baroque" (1971-9). After the departure of Pierre Larocque, Jacque Crête's lover, scenario writer and close collaborator, the company developed a more Symbolist aesthetic, in which music played an essential part, thanks to a new liaison between Crête and musician Serge Le Maire.
STAGE ONE: THERAPY, TRAINING, AND PRIVATE PERFORMANCE (1971-1974)
The Grotowskian "poor actor," divested of costumes, makeup and set, in conjunction with the opposing Baroque-inspired hypertheatrical and sexually ambiguous body conceived by Crête's collaborator Pierre Larocque, contributed to the first two stages of the Eskabelian performance experiments. Notions of sacrifice, submission to the creative impulse, transgression and resistance were central to Jacque Crête's vision of actor dynamics, stages through which the actor must pass in order to experience physical or psychic transformation. Grotowski's descriptions of the "holy actor"'s passage through the blockages of the via negativa became fused in Crête's mind with his own imaginary relationship with "Saint-Artaud," the tormented monk in Carl Dreyer's film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1927) (in which Artaud played Jean Massieu, a tortured, defrocked monk). (Pauvert 107-35) Crête's first meaningful contact with Artaud came from this magnetic actor's screen presence. He associated Artaud's penetrating gaze, tinged with erotic undertones--"le visage d'une beauté parfaite, d'une sensualité à fleur de peau, des yeux d'une violence qui crache le feu"14--with the fascinating and tortured image of Saint Sebastian. Just as this martyr figure surrenders his body to Christ in the ecstasy of his torment, Crête's true actor-martyr must willingly submit to the pain of the ritual, symbolized by the Artaudian image of the burning stake where the actor makes signs to the onlookers through the flames: "comme des suppliciés que l'on brûle et qui font des signes sur leurs buchers." (Artaud 1978 14) The torturous but ecstatic experience of pain and pleasure was the essential gesture of the Eskabelian reading of the via negativa, as it brought together Grotowski's training techniques with Artaud's theory, expressed by the Eskabelian body that willingly submitted itself to its tormentors.
In its first stages, this "submission," in Eskabelian terms, took place through the rigorous corporeal training and violent forms of improvisation that played out therapeutic or healing power relations in structures closely associated with the mysteries of Catholic ritual: Calvary, expiatory sacrifice, communion, and martyrdom. Crête worked on all these ritual processes during the training sessions with a group of selected participants and close friends.15 These group encounters were at first conceived as therapy, because they were supposed to liberate the artist at the deepest level of his psychic experience, freeing him/her both from the conventions of the mimetic stage and from preconceived notions of moral and sexual behaviour. Once liberated socially and artistically, the actor would no longer suffer from his/her marginalized status, would be totally uninhibited, and could react spontaneously to the creative impulse, no matter how shocking or repulsive such a reaction might seem to the onlooker.
Here, "victims" and other "actants,"16 as they were called during the improvisation sessions--carried out both privately and before small audiences--created scenarios which often became violent, under the watchful eye of Crête, who guided them through their therapy.17 He initiated them into emotionally stressful and sometimes physically painful situations where they were taught to endure the stress/pain and share their fears with the group. Instead of becoming paralyzed, frightened and defensive, they were supposed to learn to revel in these situations, to abandon all resistance to them, thus opening the way for the liberation of the creative impulse. In this positive frame of mind the body would be freed of its inhibiting behaviour, thus allowing it to react spontaneously to the slightest desire, or the most elementary creative stimulus. The painful experience of exclusion in daily life, heterosexual experiences as well as the physically violent homosexual encounters Larocque described in his journals, were played out symbolically through these exercises, through which the suffering actor-martyr had to learn to accept exclusion and pain by gleaning pleasure from all forms of sexual encounter, including those which relied on sado-masochistic power relationships, and which were later structured into the performances as various forms of Catholic ritual.18 These exercises were meant to liberate the actor from all forms of moral and social constraint, to help the actor discover how difference/exclusion could become a source of strength; the excluded and mistreated artist, encouraged to react spontaneously to his creative spark in these stressful situations (no matter what the reaction may be) learned how to feed off his difference and make it become a source of pure creativity. According to this aesthetic, the more the artist was excluded, or punished, the more the creative experience was heightened, inciting the performer to even more provocative and transgressive acts. The artist, no longer the victim, was able to transform his exclusion into a form of creative resistance; these strategies of resistance were the final step in the Eskabelian therapeutic acting process.
The exercises became more diversified during these first years, as the participants chosen for these therapy sessions learned how to desensitize their bodies. They were exposed to freezing outdoor temperatures, humiliated, kicked and punched, subjected to unidentified sexual contacts in a darkened space, strung up and left hanging or made to hyperventilate to the point of collapse. Some of the concentration exercises were related to the meditative techniques of yoga, meant to liberate the participant from predetermined values of all kinds.
Denis O'Sullivan described one activity which consisted in walking about with one's eyes closed, coming into contact with other bodies and reacting according to the impulses one felt at that moment of contact. These sessions often lead to collective euphoria, yelling, screaming, tearing off clothes, states of complete release and submission to a guiding presence. During one seven-hour public performance entitled Déplacement mol (1975)19 (based on these improvisation techniques) the actors were placed in different spaces around the room, isolated from each other by sheets of transparent vinyl stretching from the ceiling to the floor. The public moved freely about the space, subjecting each actor to its scrutinizing gaze. The naked actors, in turn, were concentrating so intently on their own bodies and on a specific prop that they were totally oblivious to that gaze. (O'Sullivan, 21 November 1991)20
In the first stages of this theatre, then, participants learned to focus on their bodies in improvisation, without giving any thought to a "public." The aim was not to produce theatre, but rather to attain an inner control over one's body, even if it meant sacrificing that body to the voyeuristic gaze of the public.
STAGE TWO: THE HYPERTHEATRICAL BAROQUE AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCE (1974-1979)
As their work moved from therapy to staged theatre between 1974 and 1979, the "poor" aesthetic was abandoned. Performances based on scenarios by Pierre Larocque showed hypertheatricalized bodies marked by fluid sexual codes, simulating transgressive communions and parodies of transubstantiation. Costumes were interchanged, accessories multiplied, and ceremonies became more provocative. Some of the best illustrations of the stage aesthetics and body poetics of this néo-Baroque period are to be found in Opéra-Fête (1974) and La Chambre pourpre de l'Archevêque (1978).21 Also interesting is the scenario of an opéra by Pierre Larocque, Héliogabale (unpublished notes), a work that Crête refused to stage because he thought that its pederastic images were too violent.
Opéra-Fête and La Chambre pourpre de l'Archevêque were stagings of phantasmagoric worlds where invented creatures performed disquieting rituals. The former began by carrying the spectators up to the top floor of an abandoned building in a cramped elevator. They arrived feeling extremely uneasy, and were greeted by highly decorated individuals of undefinable sexual identity. Performers' bodies were painted white, they wore black veils, huge wigs, masks, and carried flashlights. Disembodied voices singing atonal music pierced the air as the spectators were invited to penetrate the Eskabelian world and participate in the experience by crossing over into the other-world of the subconscious. In twelve scenes, actors appeared as grotesque representations of family members, reconstructing the repressed images of troubling family relations (that had obviously left their mark on the author's coming-to-terms with his own sexual identity). In one segment a mother figure appeared wearing black lace stockings, heavy makeup, red gloves, a huge hat decorated with sequins, costume jewellery, and veils, carrying a feather boa. These instruments of heightened femininity transformed the mother figure into a whore, a symbol of seduction toward her own son. Her feather boa became an instrument of torture as she wrapped it around her son's neck and made him crawl in front of her. The erotic fantasy of this scene was followed by another depicting a castrating mother who punished her son as she removed layers of clothing to reveal a belly-dancer's body, and a stomach and face covered with green shiny makeup. She then performed a striptease in front of her son, taking off bits of her costume and tossing them into a toilet bowl.
The body functioned in several ways here. The actors became mythical creatures who reconstructed the psychological experiences of the author, Larocque. These myth-driven scenarios all reconstituted the destructive influence of the phallic mother who appeared in her multiple roles as predatory female, castrating mother and whore, seducing the father in a simulated confession where the father becomes the priest. The image became even more violent in La Chambre pourpre de l'Archevêque, where the mother figure became the "Gorgogne":
a monstrous but seductive Medusa-like character with three masks, [...] her head spiked with snakes, dressed in red velvet with a heavy belt, standing on cothurns and bathed in clouds of incense and red lighting.22 (La Chambre pourpre de l'archevêque 1)
She was the mother who sliced up babies and invited the public to follow her--the great Whore of Babylon--into her own theatre where the most hidden recesses of the mind would be played out. This was theatre of the subconscious, where the natural body of the actor was either weighted down with decorative elements or, more often, consciously made ambiguous by emphasis on its androgynous forms. Her monologue describes the unstable status of this ambiguous world:
everything is false and everything is true, everything cries and laughs at the same time [...] everything finishes by melting away and freezing or by disappearing and being reborn.23 (Archives of Pierre Larocque 32)
The investigation into multiple and fluid forms of sexual identity through bodies that exhibit mixed and criss-crossed gender codes--in dress and behaviour--were important elements of these stagings. At the same time, these were therapeutic attempts to eliminate guilt, anger, and shame, as "difference" was turned into fabulously heightened forms of performance. Slim bodies were made up, covered with long hair, jewels, lace and delicate materials, but flesh was always exposed to stimulate the erotic fantasy. The mother, performed by an androgynous male body, exposed lacy stockings over muscular legs and angular hips. The marginalization of the Eskabelian actor was embodied in these extravagant corporeal transformations, where chaotic crossings of masculine and feminine codes erased any possible identification between the actor's biological identity and the ambiguously gendered creature performed by that body. The Eskabelian character came to symbolise the willingly aggressive subversion of identity categories defined within binary relations, and the flamboyantly Baroque actors of these two productions became the signs of this subversion.
In a similar vein, Pierre Larocque's scenario Héliogabale, based on the Artaudian text, reconstitutes the life and death of the Emperor Marc Aurelius Bassianos, or Héliogabale, the pederastic high priest of the cult of Elagabal, the Syrian god of cruelty. This synthesis of desire and cruelty, sado-masochistic relations within this single character, was intended as a provocative expression of Larocque's militant gay revolt, which is why it bothered Crête and was not staged. In the text, Héliogabale becomes a mythical force of transgression, the one who ignores and tramples established codes of behaviour, sexual and social taboos, in order to impose his own system of beliefs; he is the ultimate Nietzschean hero as reinterpreted by Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Larocque's scenario is a series of tableaux showing the rites of passage in the life of the Emperor using images taken from Greek and Roman theatre, as well as from Baroque opera and twentieth century pop culture. The gender-ambivalent body--already evident in Larocque's earlier Baroque stagings-- appears in this text in the mythical form of a polymorphous-perverse Hermaphrodite, the decadent hero(ine): "both male and female, a face smooth as wax, white flesh, blue veins, and a sickly pallor."24 (Larocque 1976) The proposed staging by Larocque is visualised as a long and violent ceremony of Christian-based sacrifice and martyrdom where the young Héliogabale, both expiatory victim and cruel god, "dressed as Christ" goes through scene after scene of bloody orgy and sexual calvary before having his throat slit "like a pig." The young man is subjected to the cruel and obscene carresses of the women in the bath where he is rubbed, pinched, stuck and choked, symbolically (or perhaps really) abused by those who are supposed to protect him. The image of the predatory woman evident in earlier work returns as this bath scene becomes a torture session for the young boy. In a later scene, young Héliogabale's first entry into the great Temple is consecrated by another orgy where he submits to the aggressive advances of his courtesans ("mignons"); he then offers himself "backwards" ("à reculons") to all his soldiers after he has designated as captain of his guard the soldier with the largest genitals. Héliogabale becomes the court prostitute, and his palace (decorated with torches and huge mirrors) becomes an immense brothel where he orders theatrical stagings of sexual rituals--castrations, flagellations and copulation--subversive forms of martyrdom, sacrifice and communion. Then, changing sexual roles, Héliogabale takes one woman after another, while his male guests transform themselves into Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Hitler or Tarzan.
These scenes of sexual frenzy are Larocque's own rereadings of the mystical ecstasy inspired by the pain one equates with the martyrdom of the tortured Saint Sebastian or even of Sainte Thérèse pierced by the arrow. These images empitomize Baroque hypertheatricality, that can be located theatrically in the sexually ambiguous castrati, the emblematic figure of Baroque opera. This castrati, a masculine body martyred by a medical intervention as described by A. Heriot, resembles Pierre Larocque's figures:
snow-white gloves [...] overshadowed by a vast wig adorned with feathers, flowers and birds [...] silk stockings with flowers embroidered in colour up the sides, olive-green knee-breeches with emerald fastenings and an incipient rain of ringlets falling all about his face. (Heriot 80-81)
These initial stage experiments came to an end with the departure of Pierre Larocque in 1979. He left to establish his own company (Opéra-Fête) (Levesque 160-4) and continue his experiments, which he felt were being abandoned by Crête--who was at this point more interested in performing published plays.
STAGE THREE: SYMBOLISM AND ADAPTATION (1979-1989)
After Larocque's departure, the stage aesthetic and corporeal work of the Eskabel theatre changed radically. Crête, who was not a writer but a director, preferred to adapt existing plays and novels. Gone were the overtly aggressive scenarios of domination and submission, the seductively decorated flesh and the sexually explicit activity of an ambiguously gendered body. The actors wore costumes that were historically and biologically mimetic, the productions revealing, on one level, a stage imagination that seemed to be returning to the conventions of a mimetic theatre. Marguerite Duras' play India Song25 was produced in 1979 according to the playwright's stage directions, without the slightest change in the male and female characters. Marie-Claire Blais' play L'Ile26 (1988) portrayed a variety of marginalized and recognizable characters--aging women, alcoholics, homosexual men dying of AIDS. Fassbinder's Petra Von Kant27 (1986) was more experimental, given two consecutive stagings, for the second of which the female character became Pierre Von Kant in an all-male version (starring Crête). For our purposes, the best examples of this phase of Crête's work are his adaptations of Plein Chant28 (1980), based on the novel Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, and Le Moine29 (1985), based on the Artaudian adaptation of the Gothic novel The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis.
Other forms of corporeal and visual experimentation, however, contributed to a new stage dynamic emphasizing covered bodies, signifying a desire to hide an explicit identity no matter what it was. In this apparently more discrete stage vision, the play's narrative was often almost eliminated as the elements of scenography and performance came to more closely resemble the Catholic mass--but a mass that masked sexual identification.
Crête's personal relationship with Serge Le Maire, the particular arrangements with Le Maire's wife and daughter within the Eskabelian family, as well as Le Maire's talents as a composer and pianist--all had a profound influence on the theatre of this period. Music, disembodied singing and speaking voices, and silently moving bodies, brought the creative work closer to the conventions of the Symbolist theatre and its neo-Platonic reading of reality. According to the theatrical Symbolists--of which Mallarmé and Maeterlinck are most representative--the very act of theatrical production is not acceptable because the material presence of the stage and the actor are incompatible with the symbols in the text. The staging must then transcend the material means of the production. It must somehow represent that which is "absent," the "ideal" reality which cannot be seen. In the Symbolist aesthetic, music was the ideal means by which the absence of content could be represented; it could free itself from speech and operate on the level of pure sound devoid of content.30 And visually, the dancing figure or mime, with its abstract choreography and rhythmic movements, divested of signs of gender, was the visual embodiment of music and thus of the Symbolist "absent" reality. (Mallarmé 228-39)
As music became an integral part of this new Eskabelian performance--produced by singing actors as well as disembodied whispering and singing offstage voices--no spoken words remained, and plays such as Plein Chant and Histoires d'amour31 (1984) became more like operas.32 In Le Moine, for example, Gregorian chants and other forms of religious music contributed to the hieratic atmosphere.33 Actors' bodies came to signify the silent moving body of this Symbolist ideal, as they were transformed into gracefully slow-moving apparitions, drifting in a dream-like way through the performance. The bodies showed no exposed flesh, were often divested of any signs of gender and were almost always integrated into hallucinatory-like processions, communions and ceremonies which evoked a religious event. Lewis' narrative was almost entirely replaced by interminable processions of veiled nuns moving across the performance space and up the huge staircases to the sound of Gregorian chants. The murder of Agnès by the Abbess of the Cloister, described in melodramatic terms by Lewis, was transformed into a sacrificial rite, where the young girl goes almost obediently to her death. The revelations of Mathilde, whose confession that she is a woman and not a boy took place at the summit of a staircase, became the simulation of an expiatory ceremony at the top of a symbolic altar where Ambrosio, the Monk, gives in to his repressed male desires and melts slowly into Mathilde's arms. Bodies were in general covered by religious robes; a glimpse of a bare breast in the first production was eliminated in the re-staging of the play several months later, so as to show the audience nothing that would excite sexual passion. Crête even replaced the first actor cast as Ambrosio, Roger Blay, whose heavy jowls and dark circled eyes were painfully obvious signs of male debauchery, with a more innocent and androgynous-looking young man, to remove any signs of aggressive sexual behaviour--despite the centrality of the rape and murder of Antonia to the narrative.
A certain kind of body came to epitomize this new mode of corporeal performance. Fragile and evanescent creatures suggesting a vulnerable and wounded femininity had already appeared on the Larocque stage in his last scenario, Figures34 (1978). Crête staged Larocque's two "figures" as the "mad women" ("les femmes folles") inspired by the offstage whispering voices in Duras' India Song. In Figures, they appeared as two singing creatures, almost floating across the stage, dressed in flowing robes, their hair hidden under bathing caps decorated with sparkling jewels and painted shapes. The actresses ritualized a gentle cruelty--as opposed to the violent cruelty epitomized by the Larocque vision of theatre--by performing moments of theatre within theatre on a small proscenium stage built within the larger set. The texts were short scenes from Jean Genet's The Maids, and Oscar Wilde's Salomé, showing games of sexual power relations where women play dominant roles. However, this dynamic disappeared in Crête's subsequent work.
Crête admits he was always inspired by actresses such as Silvana Mangano35 and Delphine Seyrig36, who radiated the gentle sensuality of the vaporous female he wanted to capture in all his stagings. The villain on Crête's stage in this later period is no longer the predatory female but rather the representative of hypermasculinity that epitomizes violence, cruelty and general decay--the male presence who destroys everything, according to Crête. Certain stagings polarize the relationship between the gentle female presence, represented by either male or female figures, and the exacerbated male figure. This is seen most clearly in Lewis' character, Ambrosio the Monk. He rapes, murders, commits necrophilia, and is symbolically massacred at the end of the play. Condemned to the everlasting torments of hell, he is shown pulling enormously heavy chains attached to part of the set, as he roars in torment. Crête even confesses that he would have "really killed" the actor if he had had the chance (Crête 14 December 1990).
However, the gentle dream-like performing body, both desiring and object of desire, is not necessarily a female one. In Thomas Mann's story Death in Venice, Professor Aschenbach is obsessed by the perfect beauty of a young boy, Tadzio--represented in Crête's staging by 4 young people, two males and two females between the ages of 10 and 25 years. In the play, the mute actor who played the professor (in period costume), walked continually back and forth, over a set constructed as various levels of balconies, gardens and beaches at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice. This perpetual movement served to indicate the way in which the older man followed Tadzio but never dared to approach him. The unattainable beauty was also symbolized by the fact that the boy was represented as four bodies of mixed gender, to erase any specific sexuality related to the professor's desire. In the final scene of the play, Crête staged the professor's only contact with the collective object of his desire as an imaginary event, an erotic dream. Four waiters, dressed in tuxedos, moved into the space that represented the beach area of the set. They pulled out lengths of blue material and spread them over the whole surface of the beach area transforming it into a blue sea. They then removed their clothes "slowly, ceremoniously," according to Crête, grabbed hold of thick cables hanging from the ceiling, and shimmied up the cables until they disappeared into the shadows under the ceiling. While these naked, angelic figures were moving up into the sky, they were accompanied by the voices of actors hidden behind transparent curtains around the audience, singing a capella. This gentle representation of an erotic dream--by unclothed bodies that do not perform aggressively sexual gestures--in no way echoes the violent power relations that haunted Larocque's homoerotic stage images.
It seems clear that, in these final years, the Eskabelian body and stage aesthetics no longer represented an act of revolt. Records and recollections of the stagings indicate that these actors had come to terms with their own lives; and since that was the case, the Eskabel experience had fulfilled its role and was no longer necessary. The therapy had been successful. In 1989 Jacques Crête sold the Conventum (1237, rue Sanguinet), the theatre they had occupied since 1983, and withdrew to his house in Grandes-Piles with Serge Le Maire.
ESKABEL'S LEGACY
The Eskabelian experience was important to Quebec theatre history because it was the first group of artists who attempted to link psychological healing with the problematizing of the question of gender through a poetics of the body in performance. Crête's contemporaries Gabriel Arcand (director of the Théâtre de la Veillée) and Serge Ouaknine understood Grotowski's spiritual quest through the acting process much better than Crête did; but they were not interested in questions of sexual identity. On the other hand, Michel Tremblay, who was already writing roles for transvestite characters in 1970, was not particularly interested in the acting process and the transformative/therapeutic possibilities of a corporeally based theatre.
The difference between Crête's depiction of gender and Tremblay's is instructive. The monologue La Duchesse de Langeais was first performed in 1969, (Lavoie 451) and Hosanna in 1973, when Crête first began his experiment. Tremblay's transvestite characters, however, have nothing to do with Crête's investigations into sexual identity and difference. Tremblay created political stage metaphors which were interpreted at that time in terms of power relations between Quebec and Canada, in which Quebec, dominated by another power, was obliged to mask its true identity. The transvestite body was a cover to hide something that could not be shown, the authentic body. The female dress was a necessary disguise that hid the authentic biological (Quebec) identity which must be suppressed in this oppressed society. This is made clear in the final moments of Hosanna, when Claude takes off his Elizabeth Taylor costume, stands naked in front of the audience and is finally forced to recognize that he "really" is a man and he was only playing a game for which he was punished and humiliated at the end: "R'garde Raymond, chus t'un homme." (Tremblay 1975) Tremblay in such creations does not accept the distinction between a biologically-determined sex and a culturally-constructed gender. He relies on essentialist categories and confirms the authenticity of the "natural" body by constructing his world within the heterosexual binaries of the majority. Tremblay is not investigating questions of difference. On the contrary, his marks of difference are commonly interpreted as indications of alienation, of non-identity. The writer is trying to heal the rifts between groups in order to eliminate difference. This reading of the body corresponds to the political undercurrents which critics see in his plays,37 and fits in well with the nationalist project of that period.
In Eskabel, on the other hand, theatre was part of a whole process of psychological and social healing, intended to allow individuals to come to terms with difference, including gender choices that were not necessarily linked to biological categories, to accept these multiple desires, and to use them as a source of creativity. Performance was usually a moment of personal discovery experienced by the actor, involving a rethinking of identity-categories based on individual lifestyles, psychological needs, and individual experiences, rather than on those of the collective. All those androgynous bodies decked out in hypertheatrical costumes, as well as the less flamboyant bodies playing marginalized characters, were in many cases personal statements by the actors, affirming their right to live their lives according to whatever identity they chose. They were not hiding or masking themselves; they were learning to unmask what had hitherto been suppressed because of collective disapproval. Crête's group exploded essentialist categories of identity, as it tried to change the individual's relationship with reality--and, above all, with one's own body.
There have been, more recently, avatars of the Eskabelian experience which have adopted the kinds of imagery Crête explored in new contexts, in performances that are neither overtly political metaphors nor discourses of moral and social resistance. In Michel Marc Bouchard's Lilies, for example, the staging of sexual relationships among men--in a context that associates the Catholic Mass and Genet's prison world of infinitely mirrored identities--echoes Eskabelian ceremonies, including martyrdom and communion, while the performance of sexual identity is complicated by a play-within-a-play in which female characters are performed by male prisoners in masculine dress. In Tectonic Plates, Robert Lepage integrates images of fluid sexual identification into a series of visual metaphors, in a manner reminiscent of Crête's Surrealist and Symbolist explorations. The protagonist's transformation from a man into a woman, associated with the geographical imagery of the earth's sliding crust, illustrates the shifting paradigms and unstable categories of our postmodern world.
Some of the most prominent playwrights in contemporary Quebec explore shifting and complex sexual identities in their work; it is no longer a statement of revolt. Crête's work, marginal in his own time, would seem to have prefigured the development of a Quebec stage aesthetic. He disregarded the taboos of a Catholic society and subverted its rituals, by relocating their theatrical dynamics into the performance of gender.
Photo: From Création Collective I, a public improvisation performed by l'Eskabel at the Conventum, rue Sanguinette, 15-18 May, 1973.
Photo: From Opera-Fête, performed by l'Eskable at 389, rue Saint-Paul, in Old Montreal, 9-11 May, 1974.
Photo: From La Chambre pourpre de l'Archêveque.
Photo: Jacques Crête in La Chambre pourpre de l'Archeveque, performed by l'Eskabel at 407, rue Saint-Nicolas, 16 March to 30 April, 1978
NOTES
1 My thanks to those who made this research possible:
Monique Duplantie, Denis O'Sullivan, Michel Vaïs, Louise Cartier,
Bernard Andrès, Jean-Pierre Ronfard, Serge Ouaknine and, above all,
Jacques Crête.
Return to article
2 See Towards a Poor Theatre for details about
Grotowski's notions of the holy actor and the via negativa process
of overcoming psychic and physical blocks to reach a state of translumination.
Crête read the French version of the book when it was published in
1971.
Return to article
3 Brooks' Lamda Experiment (1963) at the Royal Court
theatre in London--and his staging of Marat Sade by German playwright
Peter Weiss--were among the foremost manifestations of the post-Artaudian
ritual theatre experiments of the 1960s.
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4 Julian Beck and Judith Malina founded the Living Theatre
Group in 1947. Inspired by forms of Agit Prop theatre, Hassidic ceremonies
and forms of non-Western ritual experience, it became the focal point for
political protest through theatre performance in the 1960s.
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5 The notion of "communitas" belongs to anthropologist
Victor Turner. It was put into practice by the libertarian communities
of the 1960s.
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6 Primal Scream Therapy is a form of psychotherapy developed
in the late 1960s by Arthur Janov, and was popular in the United States
during the counter-culture movement which emphasized therapeutic experiences
through group encounters. It emphasizes the scream as an expression of
the repressed suffering indicative of the neurosis that must be cured.
The primal experience consists in reliving the psychic and physiological
trauma at a biological level, through the scream. See France Daunis, "Introduction,"
in A. Janov, Le Cri Primal, Paris: Flammarion, 1973.
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7 Crête was not the only theatre practitioner
interested in the ritual process. Serge Ouaknine, who teaches in the Theatre
Department at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal),
spent two years at Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Wrozlaw, Poland in
the 1960s; the results of his observations were published in the first
volume of the collection Les Voies de la Création théâtrale
(Paris: Editions CNRS, 1970) where he reconstitutes the performance process
of Le Prince Constant. Gabriel Arcand founded his company Le
Groupe de la Veillée in 1973, based on a rethinking of the acting
process after he had trained with Grotowski. Both these practitioners have
had to cope with various forms of marginalisation by the theatre community
in Montreal.
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8 For descriptions of Grotowski's training process see
Jennifer Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski, London/New York: Methuen,
1987; Thomas Richards, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions,
London: Routledge, 1995.
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9 Eight interviews with Crête took place in Montreal
and Grandes-Piles between 1988 and 1990.
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10 Automatiste theatre is represented mainly by Claude
Gauvreau, who wrote numerous works for the theatre. His play La Charge
de l'orignal épormyable (The Charge of the Horrinormous Moose--my
translation) was staged for the first time in 1970 by the group Zéro.
It was cancelled during the third performance because one of the actors
refused to continue before such a small audience. Crête was the only
performer in that production who had a theatre background. The contact
with Gauvreau had a profound influence on Crête, who came to understand
that theatre was a creative process that could somehow alter the lives
of the participants.
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11 C. Gauvreau's earlier works, Les Entrailles and
Faisceau d'épingles de verre, among others, are written in
his "langue exploréenne." Influenced by the abstract painting process
of Borduas and his fellow "automatistes," Gauvreau created a parallel form
of abstraction for the written text: groups of vowels and consonants that
had no relation to the semantic or syntactic structures of French were
conceived as written symbols that captured the intense feelings and sounds
of spantaneous impulses produced in highly charged emotional settings.
See the discussion in Ray Ellenwood (195-201)
Return to article
12 Many of Gauvreau's first theatre texts resembled
Surrealist film scenarios and were therefore impossible to stage in the
1950s and 1960s. Nowadays, Gilles Maheu (Carbone 14) has his actors/dancers
floating through windows on stage as they embody his own dream sequences
(see Le Dortoir).
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13 Patrice Pavis defines transcultural theatre as that
which transcends the particular in the name of the universal human condition.
Peter Brook, Richard Schechner and Eugenio Barba also located their theatrical
experiments in similar quests.
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14 From an interview with Jacques Crête, October
26, 1988. Subsequent references to interviews will be indicated in the
text by the name of the person interviewed and the date.
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15 As the workshop training became more rigorous, in
preparation for public performances, Crête selected a small group
(6-8) of serious participants, mainly artists: singers, painters, musicians,
but not necessarily actors. Together they formed an artists' commune, living
in a house in Vieux Montréal, imitating the Julian Beck model of
the Living Theatre. Among these were Monique Duplantie, Thérèse
Isabelle, Robert Charron, Denis O'Sullivan, Jacinthe Garand, Johanne Pellerin,
Pierre Larocque. The relations remained fairly stable over the years.
Return to article
16 The terminology is borrowed from Grotowski but it
is close to Moreno's vocabulary as shown by Fanchette (see works cited).
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17 This discipline was only possible because of Crête's
status as Guru within the commune. He had enormous charisma, a strong personality
that commanded the obedience of the group. Those who could not take the
strain, left.
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18 At this stage, the references to the Mass are symbolized
as expiatory ceremonies--a "sacrificial" victim was singled out by the
group in all the improvisations. Later stagings of the Mass took the form
of transgressive communions where altars, priests, nuns played important
roles. At times, the public was invited to share a final meal with the
actors as part of the performance. (Opéra-fête, 1974;
Une Histoire d'Amour, 1984)
eturn to article
19 Déplacement Mol (1975), a public improvisation
of unlimited duration, performed at 407 Saint-Nicolas St, the house occupied
by the commmune. Based on an idea of Jacques Crête, with 4 participants,
1 female, 3 males. Jean-Paul Brousseau,"L'Eskabel: un travail sur soi,"
La Presse, Dec. 1975.
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20 Denis O'Sullivan left l'Eskabel in 1979 to found
his own company, Le Théâtre Zoopsie.
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21 0péra-Fête (1974), performed
May 9-11, at 389 St.Paul St., an abandoned warehouse and rehearsal space.
Scenario and text by Pierre Larocque; staged by Jacques Crête, with
4 performers. La Chambre pourpre de l'archevêque, récitatif
pour l'acteur du théâtre de Babylone (1978) performed
March 16 to April 30 at the house on Nicolas St. Text, directed by Pierre
Larocque; 9 performers. Paul Lefebvre, "La Chambre pourpre de l'archevêque,"
Cahiers de théâtre Jeu, n.9 (1978), 73.
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22 "Personnage fantastique à trois masques [...]
coiffure hérissée de serpents, vêtue de velours rouge,
d'une ceinture massive, haussée sur des cothurnes dans des vapeurs
d'encens et un éclairage rouge."
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23 "Tout est faux et tout est vrai, où tout
pleure et rit en même temps [...] où tout finit par se fondre,
se figer, disparaître."
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24 "A la fois homme et femme, visage de cire lisse,
chair blanche, veines bleues, lividité."
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25 The play India Song (1979), based on a film
scenario by Marguerite Duras, was staged April 26 to June 10, at 1334 Centre
St., Pointe-St-Charles, a cinema converted into a theatre space, in keeping
with Crête's tendency to perform in non traditional spaces. Staging:
Jacques Crête; Music: Serge Le Maire; Cast of 12. See Michel Vaïs,
«India Song: une sonographie», Cahier de théâtre
Jeu, n.10, 1980, p. 68-70.
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26 L'Île (1988), a play written for Crête
by Marie-Claire Blais, performed April 26 to May 22, 1988 at the Conventum,
1237 Sanguinet St. The first real theatre space occupied by the company.
In 1982, Crête had staged an adaptation of her novel La Belle
Bête. This was the final production of the company.
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27 Les Larmes amères de Petra von Kant (1986),
performed at the Conventum, adapted from the play by R. W. Fassbinder into
2 versions. The female version staged by Jacques Crête starred TV
star Agèle Coutu. The male version staged by Serge Le Maire starred
Jacques Crête. Wladimir Krysinski, "Cérémonie et violences
du désir: Les Larmes amères de Petra von Kant au théâtre
de l'Eskabel," Vice Versa, n.13, 1986.
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28 Plein Chant (1980), based on the short story
by Thomas Mann, adapted by Crête, performed at the Pointe-St-Charles
Theatre in April 1980. Restaged by Crête (1982) in an abandonned
warehouse, as L'Hôtel des Glaces. Bernard Andrès, "De
l'impromptu à Plein Chant ou l'art de ne plus tourner en
ronde," Voix et Images, vol. VI, no.1 (1980), 151-153.
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29 Le Moine staged by Crête at the Conventum
in May 1985 as a performance for the Festival des Amériques.
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30 For further reading on this aesthetic of music,
see Hegel's Esthétique IV (Paris: Flammarion 1992), 1-9.
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31 Histoires d'amour (1984), based on La
Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. Adapted and directed
by Jacques Crête. Performed in the Conventum in April-May, 1984.
Bernard Andrès, « Histoires d'amour; le baiser à
la phtisique », Spirale, n.44 (June 1984), 12.
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32 Lieder by Mahler, Italian folksongs and original
music by Serge Le Maire make up the score of Plein Chant. Histoires
d'Amour includes the "Sempre libera" from Act I of Verdi's La Traviata,
as well as "Lilli Marlène" and music from Bizet's Carmen.
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33 Le Moine includes Gregorian chants, Flamenco
music, a Requiem and a Miserere by Serge Le Maire.
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34 Figures - la chambre close de l'hôtel
des glâces, produced (May, 1978) at the Three Rivers Cultural
Centre, based on a collective scenario including texts by Pierre Larocque,
Euripides (Les Troyennes), Oscar Wilde (Salomé), Jean
Genêt (Les Bonnes). Staged by Jacques Crête. New staging
(January-February, 1979) at the theatre in Pointe-St-Charles. Michel Vaïs,
"Le théâtre de recherche," Cahiers de théâtre
Jeu, n.12 (1979), 209.
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35 Silvana Mangano, an Italian actress, especially
impressed Crête as the mother in L.Visconti's Death in Venice
(1971).
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36 Delphine Seyrig, a French actress known for her
enigmatic personality and particularly musical voice. She starred in the
film version of India Song (Duras, 1975).
Return to article
37 See Elaine Nardocchio, Theatre and Politics in
Modern Quebec, Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1986. 71-73.
Return to article
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