Danièle Lévesque: A Portrait

Danièle Lévesque worked on the majority of the Québec’s stages and explored as much repertory theatre, creative and cutting-edge opera, dance and museums scenography. She has designed remarkable sets and costume for the theatre, but also for dance and variety shows (Joe Bocan), then did the scenographic design for the exhibition Femmes corps et âmes for the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec, 1996-97, which was awarded the prize of excellence from the Canadian Museums Association. Having started in small stage productions, she quickly finds herself designing for institutional theatres and multiplies collaborations with the young directors of the time: Claude Poissant, René Richard Cyr, Alice Ronfard, Brigitte Haentjens and Lorraine Pintal. She has teamed with Ms. Pintal most frequently, and it is with her that she has achieved her most elaborate set designs. She conceives for the plays of Tremblay, Dubé, Ducharme and Gauvreau a clinical and yet sophisticated look through geometric spaces where daily life is magnified and metaphorical aspects are underlined. Her work has largely contributed to the affirmation of scenic art in Quebec and she has a style and a very personal signature based on architecture, the choice of materials and the accumulation of objects. Making skillfull use of marked contrasts and ingenious integration of light to her designs, she favors an Expressionism that would have swapped distortions for lines so pure and so perfect that they become unusual. The decorations she imagines, often for the TMN and Espace Go, are grandiose or bare or then loaded in excess of objects of all kinds: cars, aquariums, refrigerators, think of Bonjour, là, Bonjour (1987) by Michel Tremblay or Hiver de force (2002) by Réjean Ducharme. She has been able to materialize in an innovative way the universe of Müller, Miller, Euripides, Genet, Molière or Gauvreau, as she has done for the latter with the play l’Asile de la pureté (2004). These achievements are also reminiscent of concentration camp-style spaces of science fiction. Enrolling in the wake of the theatre of images, at its peak in Quebec in the early 1990s, she conceived monumental set decorations making these designs the cornerstones of many modern stage productions. Her scenic visions are of pure worlds and subjective interpretations. By her own admission, the artist attempts of « create images that disturb, which surprise and cause reflection. Her talent is unanimously acclaimed by the critics and, twice, she has been nominated for the prestigious Siminovitch prize. Teacher at the ENT since 1992. From 2002 thru 2014 she was Director of the scenography program.

The founder and artistic director of CHAMBRE NOIRE, he has been an artist-in-residence at Usine C since 2017. Along with his creative practice, he has taught scenography, lighting design, and architecture at various theatre schools and universities in Canada and Europe. He has been the chair of APASQ since 2021.