The audience is invited to actively participate in your works, especially The Chains. What are you trying to achieve through this?

I’m interested in what is revealed by the dynamics of co-creation. We co-create our lives. We make the world together, but this truth is often obscured by individualist ideology and the social and political structures that surround us. The formal approaches that my collaborators and I have adopted make it more possible to feel the relationships, dependencies, and forces that define us.

I’m always fascinated to see how participants deal with the questionnaire. Some instinctively side with Creon and others with Antigone. You realize that the stories we carry inside us—myths, histories, personal experiences—influences how we perceive ourselves. But that doesn’t mean people are trapped inside these frameworks. There’s always space for us to shift the narrative and do something surprising.

I propose the audience a protocol, rules, or a structure that is quite rigid—not to restrict their freedom but so they can see how the act of obeying doesn’t necessarily stop you from being free. Restrictions often allow you to find freedom where you least expect it. I’m also interested in allowing the audience to criticize the authority of the story. This authority is helpful because it allows the show to the happen. But there is something ridiculous about it, too, which I try to reveal.

Why did you choose Antigone? What does this figure from tragedy represent for you today?

Antigone is often seen as a symbol of individual courage, of personal conviction pushed to the point of sacrifice. But what I’ve always found fascinating is that her strength is entirely dependent on others. Without her community, the world around her, she wouldn’t be able to act. Her tragedy stems in part from her inability to recognize this interdependence—a blindness many of us share. The question is whether such tragic blindness, such aloneness is intrinsic to her power.

By setting the work in Toronto during the late 90s, right in the middle of Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” I wanted to explore the contradictions of an era when individualism was presented as a virtue, whereas in reality, every action we take is influenced by relationships, contexts, and dependencies. The social violence of the late 90s made collectivity, collective action, and political resistance visible, even though the dominant discourse pretended all of these things didn't exist. Antigone fits this environment. Antigone is therefore a figure who’s at once admirable and problematic: a heroine who’s part of our cultural heritage but who we don’t really know how to relate to any more.

In your view, Antigone also raises a more personal question about the agency of someone who chooses to die.

I’ve been affected by the loss of people due to suicide. They were difficult experiences, but they raised fundamental questions. How do you accept someone else’s choice when it leads to their destruction? Survivors often tend to play down the philosophical aspects of the decision to die, to pathologize or rationalize suicide.

Through Antigone, I pose this question in a more collective way: how can a community come to terms with an action that rejects the world as it is? How do you live with the idea that, for the person who makes it, this decision may be a way of staying true to themselves? Antigone is a powerful story for thinking about these issues. In adapting it, I’m trying to understand how such extreme actions can be a meaningful part of the world we share, rather than events that are impossible for us to think about.

The end of the play suggests a different outcome for Antigone. What does this alternate interpretation of the tragedy mean to you?

In the classical play, it’s impossible for Antigone and Creon to survive one another. Their confrontation destroys them and keeps destroying them as their story is told over and over. I’ve always been troubled by that. While working on The Chains, I wanted to imagine a version of Antigone in which we finally discover another way. In my version, the funeral rites are performed by multiple people at once. It’s a simple act, but it changes everything. The story then is not about the fate of an isolated heroine but an entire community. Whether this still counts as a tragedy or not is up to us. But it’s a way of recognizing that we need each other to survive—and that collective transformation is possible.

Interview by Philippe Couture

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