This article explores how, in the 1990s, Canadian playwright Patrick Leroux broke away from previously prevalent representations of bilingualism in minority Franco-Ontarian drama and made multilingualism and translation into theatrical “play things”. His most playful performance text, Le Rêve totalitaire de dieu l’amibe, features as many games as issues at stake for staging experimental minority theatre. Substractive ideologies around bilingualism are torn apart, heterolingualism is raised and deconstructed like a strange tower of Babel and translation becomes BabelFish-like. L’ombre du lecteur anglais (The shadow of the English reader) and an Anglophone commentator are added to a production that is constantly reworked, retranslated and surtitled. The trajectory of the production from Ottawa to Sudbury (in Ontario) and Saint-Lambert (in Quebec), and then on to Montreal and to Hull, delineates a playground for translation riddled with layers of address to spectators, depending on their level of comprehension of the languages spoken on (and off) stage.
Aux drames familiaux et aux spectacles à grand déploiement des communautés francophones de l’Est canadien s’opposent, à l’Ouest, une grande fréquence de monodrames. Si le monodrame semble se faire la forme d’expression théâtrale privilégiée par les artistes francophones de l’Ouest, c’est que l’exiguïté particulière de cette région s’inscrit triplement dans les conditions de production, dans la thématique et dans la forme du monodrame. Les modalités de cette exiguïté sont négociées intimement entre l’artiste et les communautés des spectateurs. Si la thématique évolue avec le passage du théâtre identitaire au théâtre post-identitaire, la forme monodramatique elle-même continue à prédominer comme trace ultime de l’exiguïté.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.