Courville

For those who have lived in Quebec City for a long time, the word Courville evokes a village from another era that was located on the outskirts of Quebec City, Canada.

The name has since disappeared and Courville has been fused into a suburb that merged later on with Quebec City. But some remember what was distinctive about the place: its immediate vicinity to the Montmorency Falls, the highest in North America, and its Ordovician limestone subsoil that created a multitude of more or less giant caves outcropping under an uncertain surface.

Courville also recalls a more ordinary reality: the Quebec suburbs of the 1970s and their now obsolete bungalows. And, by extension, the concerns of the time. The Cold War, which finds an outlet in exciting hockey tournaments between Canada and Soviet Russia. The sometimes trippy pop of progressive rock. The eternal national psychodrama in which French and English speakers clash, and which will soon be exacerbated. And the beginning of the end of what is called, at that time, the “nuclear family”, this sociological bubble where the mirages of consumption sometimes hide sordid relationships.

On November 15, 1975, Simon is 17 years old, has his own room in the basement of a bungalow in Courville, a widowed mother mixed up with a shifty uncle, an involuntary and painfully permanent tattoo on his chest, a female friend who woos him without much success and a poorly educated athletic male friend. The coming year will precipitate things, the social unrest that is gradually taking place will find dramatic and decisive echoes in the life of the young man.

Courville sketches the portrait of a complex adolescence, where the backdrop of collective euphoria cannot occult the torments of sexual awakening, the weight of the look of others or the obsession of appearances. Throughout the show, the ancestral technique of bunraku is used to bring life to puppets of all sizes that embody Simon and his entourage.