Archives des theatre — MAI | Montréal, arts interculturels

les formes qui nous traversent (suspended indefinitely)

— This performance is suspended indefinitely. See MAI’s latest updates related to COVID-19. —

Les formes qui nous traversent unearths thirty hand-written log books recording a long period of isolation. Imagined and created by the spoken-word poet Hoda Adra, this film-concert sees her take the stage after leaving the land of Brumania, a fictitious country where pink blobs choke the voices of its people . It’s the story of the birth of a voice, oscillating between shyness, self-censorship, seduction, humour, awkwardness, shame, urgency, satire…as if it were taking its first steps. Suddenly, a fluorescent pink shape appears: the phantom Ghostwriter. It haunts the kitchen each night and fills page after page with existential theories. Writing becomes an experience of returning to oneself, shared as an act of resistance.

Hoda Adra is a recipient of MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)’s Alliance program.

Produced with the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal
as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada
Council for the Arts

tuning in

Co-presented with the MAI, Tuning In is a commissioned series of three new, short audio plays penned by women playwrights from across Canada. Tuning In tackles issues of denial, fear and care. Three Canadian women playwrights explore the perspectives that reflect our personal realities and also the truths that bind us together. The series invites us to question the human experience and how society shapes us.

For more information: https://www.imagotheatre.ca/tuning-in

No ticket reservation need.

The livestream will be available directly from aboved link during the days of the streaming.

jogging

Hanane is a woman in her 50s who goes for a jog every day in the streets of Beirut, warding off osteoporosis, obesity and depression. As she runs, she revisits her dreams, desires and disillusions. This daily routine has contradictory effects: it stimulates two hormones in her body – dopamine and adrenaline – which are, by turns, destructive and constructive, against the backdrop of a city which destroys in order to build and builds in order to destroy. Alone on stage, Hanane, wife and mother, unveils her identity as she embodies different faces of Medea. Actress, author and cultural activist, Hanane Hajj Ali is an eminent figure in the Lebanese cultural and artistic scene.

white [ariane]

ARIANE is the daughter that Nancy (a South American woman) never had. Nancy wrote a diary for ARIANE while she was inside her womb without knowing that she would be a boy. 28 years after the birth, Nancy crossed over the Atlantic to reveal the existence of the diary to her son. ARIAH LESTER (Lester Arias) takes the words from his mother’s diary and creates songs out of them. A space of (in)betweenness: monstrosity / beauty, feminine / masculine, light / darkness, concert / theatre, opera / burlesque, ARIANE / LESTER / ARIAH.

red(z) maid(z) (cancelled)

Red(z) Maid(z) is situated within a residential school where 2-spirited Anishinaabe children use their queer imaginations to play out the sadistic abuse they face daily. Their game transforms from innocent role-playing to a plot for murder. Inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids, in Ojibwe and English, repossesses colonial forms from an autonomously Indigenous perspective. Taking control of the narrative, the children reimagine their maltreatment on their own terms, centering the innocence, imagination, and resilience of Indigenous youth. Award-winning theatre makers Waawaate Fobister and Jesse Stong use absurdism, physicality, and play to draw out Genet’s themes of servitude, oppression, and revenge within Turtle Island’s lineage of colonial violence.

fragments d’ana

Fragments d’Ana is a celebration of life and memory. Falling somewhere between reality and fiction, the show subtly and poetically explores the space of solitude, while appealing to our capacity for connection. We are plunged into the innermost thoughts of Ana, a character who struggles gently against forgetting. The microcosm of her house invites us into a reflection on the passage of time, love, and the inevitability of death. In keeping with her intercultural process, Ligia Borges – cofounder of the Théâtre de l’intime – presents a mise en scène that makes space for encounters with the public, and where languages and memories intertwine.

real’s fiction\dissonant_pleasures

This dance is a song we sing in order to be together. The song is intentionally simple to open access to even the most musically-timid body. The song needs us to listen to each other, to be sung in search of a semitonal-policality; “how close can we come without consolidating into one-ness?.”

This room is listening to us speak. It captures our whispers and secrets and redistributes them elsewhere and close-by. This floor invites us to lie. This work is almost real. This world we are looking for is not for us.

camille : un rendez-vous au-delà du visuel

Camille : un rendez-vous au-dela du visuel — © Laurence Gagnon Lefebvre

In this immersive work that circumvents our sense of sight, audience members follow the protagonist through a landscape of emotions and memories in which the intimate becomes tangible. This multisensory experience, developed for a visually-impaired audience, is accessible to all; we are invited, directly and delicately, into a space of discovery and encounter. Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Audrey-Anne Bouchard has used her impairment as inspiration for developing a new artistic form. She brings together a reflection on the sensorial experience of dance, begun during her Master’s (Nice/Brussels), and the development of her practice as dramaturge.

carrion

What does it mean to be human, in an era when our destructive influence over the planet is rapidly redefining the laws of nature? This magnetic solo performance by Justin Shoulder introduces the figure of Carrion: a post-human spectre that has the ability to shapeshift into multiple forms and speak multiple languages. In the throes of forced evolutionary acceleration, wandering an archaeological site, they transform: a ghost of the west, a virus, a trickster, a prehistoric bird. Combining presentational club spectacle with dramaturgy from Victoria Hunt on raw bodily exploration, Carrion draws on queer and bicultural ancestral mythologies.

take d milk, nah? (cancelled-covid19)

This is the story of how I once birthed a cow… kinda.

Jiv is “Canadian.” And “Indian.” And “Hindu.” And “West Indian.” “Trinidadian,” too. Or maybe he’s just colonized. In Take d Milk, Nah? Parasram blends personal storytelling and ritual to walk through the Hin-do’s and Hin-don’ts at the intersections of these cultures. The show is a refreshingly candid and delightfully funny look at race, religion and nationalism(s): What divides us – and what we’re willing to accept in the desire to belong. Because we have to laugh in the face of Empire. To be able to continue to resist.

Oh, and there’s a cow.