University of Ottawa Student Theatre 2015 Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Viol( Schändung) : a magnificently choreographed production of Bothos Strauss’ reworking of Titus Andronicus. A reminder of a great evening of student theatre.

By Alvina Ruprecht | July 13, 2015

Sixteen tableaux performed by a huge cast of students including a chorus that not only speaks but also transforms itself into parts of the set and integrated symbolic forms, reveals the enormous talents of Miriam Cusson who actually choreographs as much as directs this violent ritual of human degradation, pain, cruelty and ambition. The irony emerges through a string of sado masochistic rituals of martyrization, and frenzied physical desire set off by the site of the sacrificial victim – violated, slashed and mutilated. A contemporary playful mise en abyme of a contemporary horror show where the director brings in the voyeuristic faces of the chorus peering out from the back of the set. There is the lust, the exhibitionism, the penitence…some of the most violent human instincts come crashing down on the spectator in this captivating parade of ceremonies that holds our attention every second of the evening. . The thread that runs through the performance is inherited from the Elizabethan (or Jacobean) Vengeance tragedies of Thomas Kyd a contemporary of Shakespeare; however, it owes even more to the ultimate vengeance tragedy Thyeste by the roman playwright Seneca that so intrigued Artaud

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La Charge de l’orignal épormyable: blood curdling production of this Claude Gauvreau play on the U. of Ottawa stage.

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 26, 2015

Photo. Marianne Duval.

A blood curdling all feminine production of La Charge de l’Orignal Épormyable, under the direction of Guy Beausoleil, plays this week at the U.of Otttawa . This is a rare chance to see a work by Claude Gauvreau, poet and playwright, who was one of the people who signed the Quebec Manifesto Refus Global in 1948 and set Quebec culture on a new trajectory.

This plays gives us an excellent glimpse of the poet, his tortured conscience, his vision of artistic production and his heightened idea of the poet who emerges as a god, a super presence that can save the world. We see, among other things how his dialogue, becomes a verbal form of “Automatismse”, essentially a reference to the visual art experiments of the period. , Gauvrau wrote partially in “ langue exploréenne”. Portions of his text represent “non figurative” language composed of extra-linguistice elements (sound, rhythm, accents, ) that corresponded (in spoken language) to the Automatist experiments in non-figuratuve painting in the 1950s where the sexual impulse was considered central to artistic creation. Most of those who signed the Manifesto Refus Global were removed from their jobs and became pariahs of society because it appeared that most of the artistic establishment in postwar Quebec was not yet ready to accept a form of “Modernité” that was inherited from the new European art Movements.

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Marat-Sade: The Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton will go down in the history of the University of Ottawa Theatre department!

By Alvina Ruprecht | February 26, 2015

Photo Marianne Duval. Paul Piekoszewski (Marquis de Sade) and Jérémie Cyr-Cooke (Marat).

This play written in German by Peter Weiss, with the terribly long title, was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of Peter Brook’s LAMDA experiment , a season of Cruelty, executed under the influence of Artaud’s essay The Theatre of Cruelty . The original version of the essay, first published in French in 1938 , eventually appeared in English in the early 1960s during the neo romantic revolution in the Americas and that is when the English speaking theatre world began working on interpretations of Artaud’s ideas of a “theatre of Cruelty” . Brook worked with a chosen group of actors and writers to show the relationship between theatre and the body, between, theatre and therapy, as well as the use of theatre to transform and renew Western culture by taking a new look at the French Revolution as well as the conventions of the Western stage. One look at this play, shows us to what extent Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789 was very likely inspired as much by Brecht’ as by Brook’s renewed vision of the stage.

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