40And the The version of the International Film Festival of Art (FIFA) will be the best in its long history: more than 1,000 films were submitted to the programmers, who reserved about a fifth for poster fabrication. Among them are a record number of films imagined from theatrical productions, as the last two years of the pandemic have forced performing arts such as dance and theater to turn to cinema to remain in the world. Happening to performing arts when transferred to the cinema?
In the recent pandemic months, we’ve seen a number of theatrical productions adapted to the television format appear on small screens. Télé-Québec led the way by introducing theater (Associationaired March 2021), Dance (Missing melodies, “The Montreal Jazz Ballet Penetrated into the Poetic World of Patrick Watson,” presented last January) and concerts. This is a new art film, enriched with financial assistance from various levers of cultural development of governments, benefiting today from FIFA, which begins on March 15th.
“Especially with regard to the artistic practice of dance,” confirms Jacinth Presboa, director of programming for the festival. It has received so many dance film screenings – “and so many great movies” – that the festival has scheduled a screening of Nuit de la danse, presented March 18 at the Outremont Theater (see sidebar on next page). Over 60% of the works on display during this night were created here, in Quebec.
The encounter between dance and film has already been forged for several years, notes Jacinth Presbywa, referring to the approach of choreographer and director Edward Locke, “but the pandemic has certainly been an accelerating factor for this type of production. However, recordings of theatrical performances on camera, as If the spectator is in the room, there are fewer and fewer; we are talking more and more about what we might call immersive recordings. […] It’s not at all the same energy as a scene, but on the big screen, it’s great to watch this kind of movie. »
Transformation, immersion
Like a short movie excessdirected by Xavier Curnillon and choreographer Louise Bédard. The film has been kept in the official selection, the short film category, and leaves the framework of the traditional scene for the investment of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec, whose architecture inspired the movements that Bedard imagined.
Xavier Curnillon explains that this requires thought. What do we capture with the camera, how do we capture it and what results from it? Then the emotion that emerges from the film is very different from that one feels ‘when one attends in a room and lives the performance of the dancers. By making a film in a place chosen on purpose,’ we leave an entirely choreographic act on the stage; We take the essence of the things that Louise anchors in the movement and bring them elsewhere. in a movie. »
The pandemic has given theater and dance companies time to think about a better way to present their work in the absence of a live audience. In the same way some musicians have thought outside of just recording a concert, as Chloe Belgag did (to live. spectral scene), Mary Davidson and the naked eye (Renegade Collapse Live) plants and animals )the forestBy Yann-Manuel Hernandez, FIFA World Premiere), the worlds of dance, theater and even opera and circus will present unique works at the festival.
Thus, it will be possible to watch a cinematic version of Junod From Faust, featuring the Paris National Opera and directed by Julian Condamine. “They call it an immersive opera, identifies Jacinth Brisboa, because it was filmed in a theater, of course without an audience, but at some point, we leave ourselves to find ourselves on the Champs-Elysées. Moreover, we see singers on horseback, and there are also animations on the screen – we really Elsewhere! It does not replace the performing arts at all, but it multiplies the possibilities.”
Alternative solution
Presented as a world premiere, the feature film The sum of our dreamsDirected by Jeremy Battaglia and Johan Mador, he invents cinema with circus and contemporary dance. This work would not have seen the light of day had it not been for the epidemic because at its base there was what should have been the year-end show of the National Circus School in Montreal, which could not have been presented in the room. The approach is similar to that which gave birth to the feature film pigeon projectIt was written and directed by actor and playwright Emmanuel Schwartz and features a group of alumni of the theater performance program at Lionel Groulks College.
In the spring of 2020, Schwartz was due to give a writing workshop there, but the pandemic disturbed his lesson plan, “especially since we couldn’t see each other, he says. I soon saw the students were dazed by the situation, so I polled them.” To find out how interested they were in writing a film. I was simply thinking: Wouldn’t it be good to write a film in the context of a closed door, so the kind of film that could be shot with any camera, and which collects the actors’ tools acquired during their theatrical training?”
When it became clear that theatrical productions could not take place in front of the audience in the fall of 2020, the college administration offered Emmanuel Schwartz to use the budget allocated to shoot a movie. The director of the film says: “At the time when they were going to give their first show, the students would have preferred to shoot this movie. The originality is that they rehearsed it as a theatrical performance, ”which he felt from the first scenes: the rhythm, the lines turning, these are theatrical actors performing in front of the cameras. corn pigeon project It is not a theater, so what is a theater without an audience? Without a live performance, in being, in a common place, a common emotion?
what exactly pigeon project ? Emmanuel Schwartz burst out laughing: “Damn that’s a good question! I don’t know what they are, and I don’t pretend to know them. Above all, I get the impression that it’s a great opportunity to try things out in this context.”
