Chicoutimi, Quebec (2011)

PERFORMANCE

Eric Létourneau and Carol Dallaire have been invited to propose performances within the installation on the theme of manipulation using the textual and sound materials of the installation, in particular the recording of the text Hamlet-machine.

Eric Létourneau, composer and extradisciplinary artist, proposed a sonic, textual and musical “decreation” of Müller’s play through various kinetic or stationary “installations” and an encounter with the traces of Clyde Chabot’s earlier stagings of the text.

He has invited actor Patrice Leblanc to intervene in his performance as his possible double. He brought a number of unusual objects to the stage, including an aquarium half-filled with water, in which the sound of Hamlet’s voice projected watery images onto the glass, reflecting the rage of this desperate hero, while Ophelia’s voice created a particular emotion as she sank into the water, echoing her suicide. The performance then took a more political and subversive turn: using an application on his I-phone, Eric Létourneau showed us how it was possible to easily pirate a radio station of one’s choice by changing its programme, or to listen in on police conversations in different Canadian cities and treat them as just another kind of sound material.

Five or six movements that probably won’t change the rotation of the Earth: Carol Dallaire, an interdisciplinary artist in her sixties, got very personally involved in the project, in a process of recognition in the figure of Hamlet-machine. This movement gave rise to pictorial and sound productions that he sent to Clyde Chabot in May. A few rehearsal sessions in Chicoutimi led to a more precise artistic encounter and an organic integration of his proposal into our set-up. The broadcast of coloured or dark drawings created to echo Heiner Müller’s play and incorporating fragments of the text included extracts from the play recorded on site with the Quebec actors. Carol Dallaire also played the guitar, before breaking away to leaf through archive photos of Quebec’s history – and its desire for autonomy in October 1973 – and, more broadly, of world history, as the video camera looked on. The speeches of the Front de libération du Québec at the time, broadcast with a subtle slowdown, in a mix with fragments of Müller’s play, seemed to speak nostalgically of the exhaustion of this historic moment in Quebec that remains vivid in the memory of Quebecers. Clyde Chabot proposed a female presence in the space, possibly becoming an incarnation of the female figure in the play Ophelia-Electra.

All the photographs taken during the 3-day opening were shown in the form of a video-project slideshow.