La Seizième

The play echoes Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, with a decidedly political dimension. Why did you choose to use this classic as a mirror to tell your story?

Pirandello’s play tells the story of a troupe of performers and their director working on a production when, suddenly, a family shows up on stage and demands to perform their own drama (which they believe the actors are incapable of portraying). This sparks a confrontation between the actors and the family of characters about fiction and reality, and the theatre’s true ability to represent life.

We actually began writing Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice before making the connection with Pirandello’s work. Our developing script told the story of a troupe of neurodivergent performers working on a collective creation, constantly grappling with the challenges of speaking out in an era where representation and appropriation are clashing, and where inclusion efforts often feel at odds with lived experiences of exclusion. And then one day, as I was biking down Berri Street toward the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal, the idea of connecting it to Pirandello’s work just clicked!

Joe Jack and John highlights the work of underrepresented artists. You work with an inclusive team and artists with various functional diversities. How does this influence your creative process? How do you begin working on a new piece?

We start by bringing together a microcosm of artists from various disciplines, with multiple or complementary abilities, and a range of lived experiences, generations, and backgrounds. One of our biggest challenges is to create a work where everyone feels like they’re part of the same show. My bet is that amplifying plurality will get us there. The presence of dancers alongside theatre school-trained actors, performers from immigrant backgrounds, and artists with functional diversity enriches the range of vocabularies and performance levels.

The DNA of our company is this plurality of accents, ages, speech patterns, body language, rhythms, and tones, that allows us to create works where wide diversity converges toward a shared performance level. Our hybrid identity finds balance in its vast diversity… and eventually, we all end up in the same show!

We also create over long periods—two to three years to bring a piece to life. We begin by creating a working methodology that allows everyone to collaborate. Spending extended time together allows for deep research and artistic expression to emerge, while also building new skills (diction, movement, etc.) along the way. This co-presence primarily fosters recognition of shared humanity through difference, builds strong relationships of interdependence and respect, and leads to public performances that benefit from an intimate understanding of each other’s capacities.

Can you talk about the collective writing process for Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice?

We usually write our works in a shared space. We use movement-based creation as the foundation of our process, which allows for greater professional accessibility. For example, a performer with diction or ideation challenges can use their body to express ideas. The result is highly multidisciplinary, drawing from the diverse vocabularies of very different performers.

For Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice, because of the pandemic, we started with videoconference interviews, alongside extensive research and reading on my part to launch the writing. We then held a week-long remote dramaturgical lab in August 2021, followed by another work session in spring 2022, and later a reading for an invited audience. This “paper-based” writing process resulted in the least multidisciplinary piece in our 22-year history. I often wondered whether we’d be able to memorize all that text!

Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice questions whether there are limits to what an actor can portray, or what an artist can legitimately express through their work. The play explores themes of representation, appropriation, ableism, privilege, and cancel culture… Like the confusion among the characters, the piece raises more questions than it answers. Why this decision to remain in a grey area?

We always prioritize doubt and dialogue in our writing, from the studio to the stage. By approaching a subject with curiosity and asking questions instead of offering answers, we deepen our understanding and multiply perspectives, while embracing our fallibility and limitations. Setting aside certainty to explore intuition creates many creative possibilities, the foremost being accessibility. Since no one holds the absolute truth, everyone can participate on equal footing, as intellectual capacity is no longer the measure of relevance. This opens the door to countless possibilities… including all those shades of grey!

Photo: Catherine Bourgeois by Thibault Carron

Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice is presented from October 30 to November 1 at Arts Umbrella, at 7:30 p.m., in partnership with Neworld Theatre. Performances are in French with English surtitles. Information and tickets are available on the show’s page: Cispersonnages en quête d’auteurice. A workshop on inclusive co-creation and the creation process of Joe Jack et John, led by Catherine and performers of the play, will be held on Saturday, November 1, at Arts Umbrella, from 3:30pm. More information on our cultural outreach page.