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June 4, 5, 6
Hôpital Louis-H. Lafontaine
French : 2h40 with intermission
Presented in association with : Les Impatients, which offers a place for artistic expression for people with mental health problem.
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Theatre Beyond the Gates
With eleven actors, a team of designers and a 20-voice choir, Lorraine Pintal is turning Louis- H. Lafontaine Hospital into a theatre stage in order to examine the various facets of Asile de la pureté, a play written in 1953 by poet Claude Gauvreau. The troupe’s occupation of the space will be dictated by the architecture of this place of internment. From the monumental (a road marked out by a funeral procession and the coffin of his muse Edith Luel) to the miniscule (young Marcassilar’s room), this parade of the fools of power hovering round the sick bed of the rebellious will take on the allure of a macabre circus. By means of a three-sided performance space and a fluid, highly mobile presentation, the audience will participate in a dramatized reading that changes every night, for revealing the mysteries of the strange world of dreams calls for improvisation and openness to new possibilities. The public is invited to become an integral part of this work-in-progress and the ritual killing of Donatien Marcassilar, the playwright’s doppelgänger, played by Marc Béland.
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© Jean-François Gratton
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Claude Gauvreau
A poet, playwright and polemicist, Claude Gauvreau left behind an extensive legacy that occupies a prominent place in Quebec literature. An unrepentant militant in the automatist artistic movement, in 1948 he signed Paul-Émile Borduas’ manifesto le Refus global, a seminal moment in the cultural history of Quebec. A poet of cruelty and beauty, his works crackle with the force of a voice let loose and freed at last. Highly autobiographical, Asile de la pureté is an innovative ode built on improvisation and audacity, one that never shies from snaring the world with its vigorous momentum. It is a face-to-face encounter with the world as it is, by means of words expressed with intransigence, pride and majestic excessiveness.
Lorraine Pintal
With Asile de la pureté, Lorraine Pintal is back in the universe of the celebrated poet, for whom she has developed a deep affinity. After the success of the play Oranges sont vertes presented at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 1998 and the opera le Vampire et la nymphomane presented in 1996, she is pursuing in greater depth the “ Gauvreau experiment ”. By presenting for three evenings a staged reading of the play in a non-theatrical space, the director and her team are expanding the possibilities of intervention.
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