Season 2019-2020

“Meet the time as it seeks us” – Shakespeare, Cymbeline

I miss the theatre violently. Terribly. Viscerally.

I am now cut off from everything that defines me as an artist. The unexpected encounter, the rehearsal hall, a discovery, a disappointment, an imperfect but essential statement, a moment of beauty that unnerves me: all these beams of light are so distant now. It hurts.

I continue to read and to dream, but the exercise leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. The exhausting uncertainty and the rage that arises from helplessness condemn me to sleepless nights, just like the thought of the fragile beings that surround me everywhere – there are so many of them. But I know that I am not alone in my insomnia. Friends and strangers alike from all parts of society are experiencing similar feelings. It is proof that we are linked; that we are also a community. I like this. It gives me hope.

I am reduced to reflection. I write “reduced” because without practice, without implementation, the theatre does not exist for me. Not really. Conceptualizing theatre can only approximate its true and very real brilliance.

________

The world that gave meaning to the theatre no longer exists.

How do I dialogue with Power when my reason for being, my profound wish to connect with an audience, is now impossible? How can I be creative when face-to-face theatre is dangerous? How do I live with this disease in the long term? How do I prepare for the future without falling into clichés or facile solutions? To rely on polls to determine future programming and to believe that only technology holds desperately sought after solutions both seem suspect. They make me feel even more fragile. What to do?

Each day of confinement that passes, benchmarks disappear. Aesthetics, complexity, hybridity – these seem to be overwhelmed by the scale of the medical crisis. The fact that political leaders with whom I shared so little ideological affinity just a few months ago have revealed themselves to be effective and reasonable leaders is not reassuring. In this new world, adversaries have become allies and partners of the past act without stopping to keep pace with artists.

It is a paradigm shift I never anticipated.

_________

I know the theatre will be reborn.

Whether in some other form or with some other appearance, eager audiences will be there, like me. We will know how to replenish it. We will love it again. We will be one once again.

In the meantime, I will tame this beast that separates me from my practice, the one that is curiously called “time”. I didn’t think that what I had been asking for so long –”time” to think about my craft and art, “time” to dream of projects, “time” to brainstorm new ideas – would actually turn out to be a pernicious master. Did I need so much “time” to understand that these same words will never again have the same meaning?

Yes, absolutely. This is the first great lesson of this journey, both for me personally and for society at large.

I accept it.

For now, I will stay close to my kin. They are my clan.

With them, I will be fragile.

With them, I will be patient.

With them, I will be creative.

With them, I will herald the return of the essential light that gives meaning to our existence and to our City.

Joël Beddows, TfT’s Artistic Director

Written by Isabelle Kirouac-Massicotte – University of Toronto

Since 2011, Les Zinspiré.e.s has been a playwriting contest for high school students in southern Ontario (teenagers from 14 to 18 who speak French either as their mother tongue or as a second language).  In so doing, it promotes the use of French in Ontario to younger generations. The five selected finalists see their plays performed on stage at the Théâtre français de Toronto. The idea of ​​having young amateurs (who may become professionals in the future) collaborate with experienced theatre practitioners is reminiscent of the community and semi-professional origins of Franco-Ontarian theatre. Needless to say, the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, the first company in French Ontario, was founded in the early 1970s at Laurentian University in Sudbury through the efforts of young artists themselves barely past their own adolescence. Likewise, the Théâtre d’la Corvée, founded in 1975 in Vanier (Ottawa), was a semi-professional company where most of the actors were amateurs who learned the trade by practicing it. The Zinspiré.e.s teenagers, with support from writers and actors, participate in a creation process true to these Franco-Ontarian roots and is inclusive and non-elitist (though the idea of elitism still clings tenaciously to the theatre). Thus, they are free to express themselves in their own words, with their own expressions and vocabulary: these are issues that are still relevant today, especially in a minority Francophone environment where linguistic insecurity is still very real. The 2019 version of Les Zinspiré.e.s scripts stirs together normative and oral forms of French – isn’t the orality already implicit in the name “Les Zinspiré.e.s”? – and English, whether it is integrated into the text or emphasized in its difference with italics. In any case, they are free to write as they wish which allows for great inventiveness.

It is indeed an adolescent form of writing – Alain Masson would call it “écriture sauvage[1]”, writing that, without carrying a pejorative meaning, is characterized by its originality and its non-conformism, its immediacy and its refusal of any form of opacity.  It also brims with a distrust of institutions hearkening back again to the pioneers of Franco-Ontarian theatre. For the most part, these short plays display a rebellious relationship to authority as embodied by the figure of the teacher, that invariable icon of adolescence. But the scripts of Les Zinspiré.e.s have nothing childlike or frivolous about them: they reveal the anxieties of youth. Far from showing the superficiality and narcissism we associate too often with adolescence – this isn’t about “boy meets girl” or the football player choosing a university that his father doesn’t approve of – these “damned youngsters” manage to translate the immediacy of the everyday, which may seem  banal but actually leads to observations about society as a whole. The anxiety – the anguish! – about academic achievement, this feeling that accompanies us from childhood to adulthood, is a pretext for looking at issues of productivity and hyper-performance. Moreover, the lessons learned at school, be they La Fonction sinus or La Troisième Loi de Newton, serve as metaphors for more universal realities. The most advanced form of school anxiety is certainly linked to the obsession with school shootings, as seen in such vehicles of popular youth culture as 13 Reasons Why or Degrassi: Next Generation.

The creations of Les Zinspiré.e.s challenge the idea of disengaged youth. They are a reflection of a generation that is aware and hungry for social justice. Its targets are widespread: from the education system to poverty endemic among indigenous children, from plastics in the oceans to gender stereotypes. But the different forms of anxiety, including eco-anxiety, are also offered with humor; some of the scripts are educational in nature, minus the moral tone. In a way, Les Zinspiré.e.s is a potential incubator for the next generation of Franco-Ontarian theatre. This is no small thing: to encourage and support our successors in a minority setting is an important challenge, crucial for the vitality and future of theatre.

Isabelle Kirouac-Massicotte – University of Toronto

[1] Alain Masson, Lectures acadiennes : articles et comptes rendus sur la littérature acadienne depuis 1972, Moncton, Éditions Perce-Neige, 1994.