Image Theatre

Abstract

“There are no obviously identifiable characters, just human beings who express fear, love, ecstasy, violence and death by colliding with spoken words, as if only an expressive body could adequately convey the intensity of the exploded script.” Hélène Beauchamp’s summary of the Omnibus production of René-Daniel Dubois’s Deux contes parmi tant d’autres pour une tribe perdue included here applies to much of the other work discussed in this issue, work that pursues physical more than literary values. With the “explosion” of the script in this work, the authority of the word – and of its author – is eroded, perhaps even replaced, by the transitory theatre event that denies commodification into book or tape form because of its spatial as well as temporal essence. In Quebec, this is the work of concepteurs and créateurs – terms that defy easy translation into English theatrical terminology. Even when this work expresses the vision of one artist, it invariably is created by a group whose collaborative methods are considerably different from those of traditional theatre production. Working from concepts rather than scripts, they ignore the assumptions of conventional dramaturgy as words give way to images; here, images are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves.