Montreal: Festival de Theatre des Ameriques, May-June, 1995

Abstract

The Festival de theatre des Ameriques is remarkable for the range and quality of the performance spaces that it has available and deploys to such good effect. This is partly due to an extraordinary proliferation of performance spaces in Montreal over the last ten years, unequalled in any other city in Canada in this respect; and it is partly due to the enterprise of Marie Helene Falcon, the Festival’s Director, in acquiring the use of a variety of venues and matching them to specific productions. Her programming has always brought the spectators into performance spaces of various kinds, shapes and sizes and she has often exploited not only the physical attributes of the locations but their local cultural resonances. In 1991, for example, Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice, the late Reza Abdoh’s brilliant, postmodern reworking of cultural icons for an AIDS-conscious spectatorship was performed in the Clarke Theatre of Concordia University, an all-purpose assembly hall, with few of the markings of a traditional theatre. Similarly, in 1993, Robert Wilson’ s production of Gertrude Stein’s When Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights was performed in UQAM’s newly-completed Salle Pierre Mercure, which architecturally reinforced the spatial rhythms of Wilson’s mise en scène. By contrast Tadeusz Kantor ’s production by Cricot 2 of La Classe morte, featured during the 1991 FTA, was accommodated at the historically significant Theatre Denise Pelletier, where an exhibition of the company’s posters was also mounted. In 1991, when the FTA took the relationship between theatre and dance as one of its themes, it featured Marie Chouinard’s first choreography for a troupe of dancers at the Monument-National, while Falcon also introduced Festival audiences to the possibilities of more intimate dance performances in the new Agora de Danse at UQAM, with Rebis, Alvaro Restrepo’s ritualized dance exploration of space and the spoken word, done in homage to Garcia Lorca.