The French Theatre Residency

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Clearing the field to create

Because theatre anchors us, challenges us, consumes us. Because making it deserves time, reflection, and interaction with the public. We want to nurture it, to expose its workings, to push back its limits. Let’s open the doors!

A special recurring project initiated by Mani Soleymanlou, the French Theatre Residency allows us to welcome creators to explore a particular approach or style, to hone their skills or just let them soar.

This season, two one-year explorations, each digging into distinct yet complementary territories where the intimate and the collective mingle, giving voice to a journalistic approach, an approach rooted in communities. Two projects that resonate with local experiences, perspectives and testimonies, at the very core of the work.

Marie-Ève Fontaine’s Giant Mine

237,000 tonnes: this is the amount of arsenic trioxide found in the ground of Giant, a former gold mine in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. This toxic substance, a byproduct of 60 years of mining, is now a threat to the environment, forcing some questions: How to clean up this mess? Was this mining project worth the effort? If rock could talk, what would it say? Using verbatim interviews, sound prospecting techniques and citizen participation, Marie-Ève Fontaine and her team are working to design an extraordinary theatrical experience that will encourage the public to think about our relationship with the territory.

“I am very proud to be artist in residence at the NAC French Theatre this year. For almost 10 years now, I have been working with the French Theatre team on various projects that allow me to deploy my creativity and share my passion for the arts with various communities. Being invited by Mani and his team to be an artist in residence is a sign of trust in my work; it’s wind in the sails for my long-term Giant Mine project which will be the subject of multiple stages of work throughout the year. I will also have the pleasure of contributing to several French Theatre activities throughout the season, allowing me to create links between staff members as well as spectators and artists who frequent this flagship place of artistic excellence in Canada. I can’t wait to make my contribution!”

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    Marie-Ève Fontaine

Guillaume Saindon’s Le vol du siècle

A visceral plea, a dive into the soft shadows of screens, where technological titans silently shape our thoughts. Between the glare of notifications and the endless flow of feeds, we uncover the invisible cogs that steal our concentration, monetizing our attention. Le vol du siècle is a work on the line between reality and fantasy, where the scene reflects modern excesses, and where the irresistible calls of dopaminergic stimuli blend with the murmurs of a world saturated with information. An investigation into cognitive sovereignty, a manifesto against the erosion of our collective attention.

“This residence is the unexpected possibility of thinking and creating without constraints; it is the unparalleled possibility of having access to a community, to resources; it’s the non-existent possibility, these days, of being able to take the time, well, a little, to slow down in order to take care of producing new works.”

  • Guillaume Saindon

2022–2023 and 2023–2024 Seasons

La mouette (The Seagull) investigated by Catherine Vidal

For the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 seasons, French Theatre will host Catherine Vidal, a researcher of wide-ranging culture, inexhaustible curiosity and keen intelligence. Here at the NAC, she directed Le grand cahier (2012), arranged the words of women in S’appartenir (e) (2015), and orchestrated the fantastical journey Je disparais (2017).

Her goal? To build a dramaturgical and scenic notebook that will lay the foundation for an investigation of Chekhov’s La mouette (The Seagull). With that in mind, she will gather texts, echoes, images, music and atmospheres, and test them out on the performers’ bodies.

By dialoguing with this classic of the repertoire, Catherine Vidal seeks to impose a healthy distance from the chaos of the present. Will this venture quench our thirst for depth, perspective and new ideas? We’ll just have to follow her. Dare to dive into her creation with her.

Audiences will have unique opportunities to follow the project’s evolution through experiences such as musical readings, stage installations, sound creations. In the spring of 2024, a show will be produced by the Cœur battant company, in coproduction with French Theatre and Théâtre Prospero.

Catherine Vidal shares her impressions on her residency and the work she is doing on La mouette (The Seagull)

Letter to French Theatre audiences, November 6, 2023: So many things have been considered, put in place and tried out for the production of La mouette (The Seagull) since I wrote to you last January...

Letter to French Theatre audiences, January 29, 2023: My name is Catherine Vidal and I’m a director. At the invitation of the NAC’s new artistic director, Mani Soleymanlou, I’ll be the NAC French Theatre artist in residence this season and next...

“In the creative process, time is always at a premium. The NAC French Theatre residency will allow me to explore Chekhov’s The Seagull in depth, to work on its translation, and to try out aesthetic avenues other than those often associated with this type of play. To explore the themes found in the play (art and creation, the generation gap, young artists’ need to carve out their place and established artists’ dread of obsolescence, traditions and the avant-garde) by delving into Chekhov’s correspondence and short stories, by reading essays or simply by observing my contemporaries...”

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    Director Catherine Vidal