OUTRAGE AU PUBLIC
Christian Lapointe reinvents the art of – literally! – putting the audience face-to-face with itself, thus turning the theatre inside out like a glove.
Christian Lapointe takes on the founding text of anti-play – the playful and destabilizingOffending the Audience by Peter Handke. Nearly fifty years after its creation, Lapointe reinvents the play’s celebratory radicalism. Taking the show’s title and the line “This is not a play” quite literally, he casts the audience as the only living character in the piece, placing the spectators face to face with themselves. They are both the subject and the object of this unusual performance, where theatrical representation is turned inside out.
In this refreshing and fun-loving recreation, Christian Lapointe leads the affront using astonishing synthesized voices. Subjected to the orders of dehumanized robots, the spectators will be chased out of the theatre – we won’t tell you how! – by the infamous cascade of insults at the end of Handke’s play. Is it an object of live cinéma-verité, studio art or digital theatre? Who knows?
PRODUCED BY RECTO-VERSO
WRITTEN BY PETER HANDKE
CONCEIVED AND CREATED BYCHRISTIAN LAPOINTE
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR AND VIDEO PROGRAMMER PIERRE-OLIVIER FRÉCHET-MARTIN
PHOTO CHRISTIAN LAPOINTE
CODIFFUSION LA CHAPELLE
WRITTEN BY PAUL LEFEBVRE
TRANSLATED BY NEIL KROETSCH
PREMIERED AT STUDIO D’ESSAI, MOIS MULTI, QUEBEC, JANUARY 31, 2013
PETER HANDKE + CHRISTIAN LAPOINTE (QUÉBEC)
RECTO-VERSO
Between Doing and Portraying
Since founding Théâtre Péril in Quebec City in 2000, the writer and director Christian Lapointe has pursued a singular career, creating theatrical objects of demanding density where poetry, death and reality combine to question the existential emptiness of contemporary life.
