For three years, Evelyne de la Chenelière wrote on the entrance wall of Montréal’s Espace GO theatre as part of an artistic residency that would profoundly shake her practice. The culmination of this is La vie utile [translated as Ravage of Life], a bold departure from prevailing norms where the author breaks with textual and performative conventions in her dramatization of a multi-faceted instant between life and death.

In this experimental play—preceded by an original essay about its creative process—bits and pieces of a family’s realities unfold in a non-linear simultaneity that reflects, with captivating irony, the difficulties encountered when language is expected to facilitate communication.

Ravage of Life is a challenging invitation to eviscerate literature and conceive a space where words find their body, freeing poetic expression from grammatical constraints, logic, and structure in order to embrace the limitlessness of living thought.

Writer and actress Evelyne de la Chenelière is an essential figure within Québec theatre. Translated and presented throughout the world, her plays question the limits of language and the experience of writing. In 2017 she was a finalist for the Siminovich Prize for excellence and innovation in Canadian theatre. Among her works, La vie utile, created at Espace GO and staged at the Festival TransAmériques, received the Marcel Dubé Award from the Académie des lettres du Québec, and premiered in German in Frankfurt. Bashir Lazhar was adapted into the film Monsieur Lazhar by Philippe Falardeau and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Her most recent play, Le traitement de la nuit, was directed by Denis Marleau in Montréal, premiered in Frankfurt in German translation, and was the subject of a public reading at the Comédie Française in Paris. Evelyne de la Chenelière’s journey is marked by formal exploration and a desire to question living art, both through writing and acting. A singular artist who defies expectations, her work is present in major institutions in Québec and abroad, but also lives within their hidden margins.

Evelyne de la Chenelière's profile page

Louise H. Forsyth has always loved performance and theatre. As an amateur lover of the stage, she has acted, sung, danced, written, directed, produced, translated, stage managed, served as props manager, and hung out as much as she could as spectator. Woven into an amateur obsession with theatre has been her professional life, where she wrote two theses on the classic French writer of theatrical comedy, Molière, taught courses and supervised theses in theatre, drama, and dramatic literature, wrote scholarly studies about French and Québec playwrights, and theorized about acting and dramatic writing. Her areas of academic specialization are feminist performance and dramaturgy in Québec. Along with her passion for what the women of Québec have written for theatre, she has been engaged for quite some time with developing theories of dramaturgy and acting au féminin, along with revealing the sources of tenacious sexism in the practices and conventions for doing theatre, for studying and evaluating it, and for recounting its history. In short, she has been wondering for quite some time why womenâ??s roles have tended to remain stereotypical in works for stage, TV and film, why theatre done by womenâ??when its perspective is explicitly derived from a womanâ??s point of viewâ??is still easily dismissed with a summary shrug as deserving only condescending scorn, why womenâ??s theatrical experimentation is so rarely discussed by scholars as serious theoretical work or used by them in their own theoretical reflections, and why the silence of critics on women and their richly creative activities has not yet been overcome when it comes to their accounts of theatre history.

Louise H. Forsyth's profile page

• Winner, Prix Marcel Dubé
• Nominated, Governor General’s Literary Award for French Drama