L'Autre hiver at the FTA

L’Autre hiver: a total phantasmagoria. With the

opera L’Autre hiver, presentedon June 1 and 2, UBU willingly gave in to the temptation to create a total art. Music, video projections, technology, sound design andliterature: this large-scale show brought together the talents of playwright Normand Chaurette for the libretto, composer Dominique Pauwels, particularly active on the Flemish theatre scene, and above all director Denis Marleau. In the wake

of Les Aveugles. A

major figure in Québec theatre, Denis Marleau founded the Ubu company in 1982. Nearly 35 years later, with some fifty creations at the crossroads of many disciplines, the company enjoys an international reputation. A convincing example is Les Aveugles, written byMaurice Maeterlinck and conceived and directed by Marleau. Created in 2002 and presented again in 2012 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, this extraordinary piece would be performed more than 800 times around the world. Here, no actors were present on stage. The faces of two actors, Céline Bonnier and Paul Savoie, had been filmed six times, producing a chorus of 12 characters projected

on a screen. An

opera of revenants. It is from this technology that the company drew tocreate L’Autre hiver, this time with even more ambitious stakes. On the heads of 28 mannequins placed on stage are projected the ghostly faces of men, women and children. Together, they sing, tell and listen to a story: that of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two cursed poets who loved each other madly. These two characters, embodied not by men but by two sopranos, wander on the deck of a ship caught in the ice, creating an atmosphere accurately captured by the word phantasmagorical. Unreal, dotted with troubling illusions and fantastic visions, the hour and a half of the show shines through its particularly poetic staging, in which, in darkness, on a transparent canvas, hidden projection devices produce luminous diabolical figures. What

we liked:

the remarkably effective soundtrack, the sound design, the music composed by a visibly seasoned musician, whatever detractors of dissonant music may think, and the particularly powerful interventions of the children’s choir of Théâtre de la Monnaie, the Brussels opera

house. What we

liked less: a story that is hard to follow for those unfamiliar with the protagonists, and the awkward quality of the voice recordings projected from speakers hidden behind the mannequins’ heads. By comparison, those in Les Aveugles were flawless. If the unintelligible recordings were a conscious directing choice, it is at least debatable. Fortunately, the text projections on a screen saved the day and made it possible to appreciate Chaurette’s highly visual writing.