THE DESIGNERS OF THE WORLD OF MICHEL TREMBLAY
Writers, directors, editors: Raymond St-Jean, Jimmy Lakatos
Set Designer: Anne Séguin Poirier
Music, Sound Designer: Gaëtan Gravel
Lighting Designer: Normand Chassé
Ipad interface designer: Alex Burton
Original idea: Lise Bertrand, Andrea Hauenschild
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
To tackle the power of Michel Tremblay’s world, the designers of this exhibition sought to appeal to viewers’ senses and emotions. Numerous sound and visual excerpts join selections from his writings and family photos. A video, True Lying, is projected across three of the room’s walls and three big cubes whose surface evokes the sheds along the allies of Plateau-Mont-Royal with their brick, fiberboard, and corrugated metal.
On the wall is Michel in Five Times, five stations incorporating text, interview excerpts, and photos of Tremblay at various stages of his life. They are grouped around the high points of his artistic development.
Visitors are free to come and go at any time from the three cubes that make up the installation. The first cube, The Magic Cave, has armchairs like the ones the young Michel Tremblay would curl up in to read. It recounts this part of his life and along with memories of rue Fabre. The second cube, The Kitchen, with its chrome Arborite table and walls covered with Gold Starstamps, evokes a 1950s-era kitchen. The cube’s contents focus on Les Belles-Sœurs. The third cube, Backstage at the Archives, evokes backstage at a club on Montréal’s fabled boulevard Saint-Laurent, “La Main.” Visitors sit at a makeup table to explore copious visual archives (interviews and television and film adaptations of the plays) which are controlled through an iPad interface.