Denis Marleau
Denis Marleau founded the Ubu company in 1982. With it, he created some 40 shows that, very quickly, reverberated beyond Canada's borders. His innate curiosity led him to the discovery of everything that can constitute "theatre material": from the most contemporary avant-gardes to the most performed classics, from Jarry to Chekhov, from the Oulipian Queneau to Büchner, from Tabucchi to Goethe. Without neglecting any of the great poets of the stage or novels, he does not flinch before scholarly montages and transpositions or before comparison with the theatre's sister arts. Music, visual arts, puppetry, new technologies: everything is grist for the mill to create innovative and audacious, comic or tragic forms, always atypical and stylised, relying on skilled and engaged actors. Vowing a limitless admiration for those who before him upset our traditions and conceptions of art, he is also interested in Tzara, Picasso, Kagel and Koltès whose Robert Zucco he would be the first to present in North America. We have already seen his shows in Avignon: Old Masters by Bernhard and The Crossing of the Indiana by Normand Chaurette in 1996, Nathan the Wise by G. E. Lessing in 1997, The Concise Köchel by Normand Chaurette in 2000, The Blind by Maeterlinck in 2002. He was artistic director of the Théâtre français du Centre national des Arts d'Ottawa before Wajdi Mouawad.