Revenez Lundi tours Belgium in October
by School of the Arts
October 02, 2006
Revenez Lundi (Come Back on Monday), a play created through a creative collaboration between McMaster School of the Arts researcher Dr. Catherine Graham, the Theatre Parminou (Québec) and the Compagnie de Campus (Belgium) opened the Festival International du Theatre Action in Belgium on Wednesday, Sept. 27.
Revenez Lundi joins 13 productions created by artists from Canada, Belgium, France, Italy, Brazil, Vietnam, Palestine, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Morocco and will tour Belgium throughout the month of October.
In March, Revenez Lundi will tour Quebec and the creators look forward to discussions with audiences in these two national contexts. Additional presentations in the Toronto-Hamilton area are possible if there is enough interest from sponsoring organizations.
The creation process behind the play is an important first step in developing wider international creative collaborations been researchers and artists working on theatre for social change.
Following a talk at the Rencontres Internationales du Theatre d'Intervention in 2004, artists from the Theatre Parminou and the Companie de Campus invited Graham to join them in creating a project looking at how professional helping relationships are changing in face of increased social mobility and global competition for resources.
Funding from the Commission International du Theatre Francophone and the McMaster Arts Research Board allowed the researcher and artists to meet for creation workshops in Belgium and Quebec. Between workshops, work on theatrical images continued through the intermediary of Humanities Computing's IRIS infrastructure for video streaming.
The result is Revenez Lundi, a story of two women of similar social status who find themselves on opposite sides of a closed door.
Gervaise Latulipe is a social worker with a huge case load of social assistance recipients. Johanne Zappa is a recipient, recently returned to her home country after a marriage breakup.
Johanne has arrived during Gervaise's lunch hour, trying to catch Gervaise when she's not too busy. But Gervaise refuses to open her office door. The action of the play takes place over the course of the lunch hour as the two women chat, assess each other, confide and argue, each on her side of a closed door.
What is really separating these women? What unites them? Can paid work still be meaningful? Do we still have the right, or the resources, to dream? Can we afford to care for each another? It will be up to audiences to develop the answers to the questions raised in Revenez Lundi, questions that the creative team has tried to pose more clearly by showing what they mean for the everyday lives of people faced with the necessity of adapting to a changing world.
For more information, please e-mail Graham at grahamca@mcmaster.ca.
