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Good as gold Pol Pelletier thrills again with Or by GAËTAN CHARLEBOIS
Before the lights have even dimmed, the general consensus is that Pelletier is a national treasure--whatever the nation--whose musings on theatre, art and life are not just intensely personal but also of vast import. She begins Or in a very gentle, very soft voice and the audience makes the slightest and quietest move forward to hear and then is completely still. She refers to the space and the work as a construction site and then we descend into the piece itself for, tonight, we are going to talk about the act of acting. It's about taming technique and absorbing it so that it doesn't become a crutch; indeed, the artist's impediment to creativity. It sounds dry, but Pelletier illustrates with anecdotes, exercise and act. The first moments of Or show us a typical acting exercise where the artist is virtually crippled by her technique, returned to a primitive ecstatic state that incapacitates the body even as a liberating Ginsbergian howl rises from the viscera. She tells us deliciously wicked stories of North American actors whose spines don't seem to bend, whose voices remain hollow, who weep even when a scene is not apparently sad. She speaks of the grail: the sacred bond between performer and audience, where even the nature of the audience's laughter--even the mad laughter--is parsed and nurtured. And she reminds us (and this is key to her greatness as a performer) that fear is essential to art. It is the perfect show for the Festival de théâtre des Amériques. It is brilliantly smart while still gently cynical about the theatre and its pretensions. It's riotously funny and exploding with inventiveness. Since it is a workshop, these spontaneous and inventive moments change from night to night. But the opening-night crowd lucked into a magnificent minute. The rain began to fall on the metal roof of the theatre. First there was the clicking but then deafening tattoo of a torrent. Pelletier, caught in a moment, revelled in the glorious noise. She raised her arms in a salute to the angry muses and the audience, practically sharing Pelletier's clothing--so intimate was the atmosphere--burst into a cheer of unrestrained joy. It was bliss. And I thanked those same muses that I had been there for it. Or by Pol Pelletier is at 55 Prince. Info: 871-9974 |
What a nifty theatre 55 Prince is. In the guts of the warehouse district of the Old Port, it has a comfortable bar/gallery, a steeply raked seating arrangement around an arena-like space and, on opening night of Pol Pelletier's Or, a packed house of 350 of Montreal's die-hard artists and theatre enthusiasts--people who drink, breathe and fuck theatre. Pelletier's piece is a work in progress and concludes the trilogy that began with the wondrous Joie and Océan.