Photo — Max Tremblay
Photo — Stéphanie Jasmin
Photo — Max Tremblay
Twelve faces emerge from the darkness. Six faces of women and six of men. Glances which do not cross, which do not carry on anything precise or which are absent to us… They are all blind. Immobilized in a dark forest where they had dozed off, they wait for their guide. So they speak to each other to ease the anxiety, to make sure they are not alone. They listen with fear or hope to the noises that emerge from the darkness around them. Their guide does not answer, no longer answers. Les aveugles—not knowing whether it’s day or night and finding themselves in a kind of metaphysical space between life and death—feel abandoned.
Les Aveugles is a one-act play written in 1890 by Maurice Maeterlinck. As part of an artistic residency at the multimedia room of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Denis Marleau chose to approach the play by pursuing his research on video integration in theatre. The technological phantasmagoria that results from this creative work at the museum is a 45-minute “theatrical session” in which the play Les Aveugles is performed entirely through video projections on masks. Two actors, Céline Bonnier and Paul Savoie, play the twelve characters. Denis Marleau thus intersects Maeterlinck’s own reflections, who, like Jarry and later Craig, sought in his writings on theatre another alternative to the living actor as a vector of the text—like effigies, puppets or other shadow projections. This innovative project uses state-of-the-art technology to demonstrate that theatre can be in total harmony with the times.
Discover the co-directors of UBU presenting the play ‘Les Aveugles’ at Le Diamant. Check out the article ›
