Your career as an artist is intrinsically tied to your work as an activist for indigenous rights. Can you tell us more?
I came to the theatre at about thirty, after working in social justice with indigenous women’s associations, including with a Kahnawake community living right next to Montreal. I was in charge of international relations within the association. We created projects with female indigenous leaders throughout the Americas. It’s an experience that’s allowed me to become polyglot, but also to reclaim the Anishabemowin language, which was my grandfather’s mother tongue. I founded Productions Onisha, which means “Wake up,” in 2011, and since then we’ve continued building bridges between indigenous peoples from all over the world to honour the diversity and richness of those cultures. The idea to me is to connect to the whole world to draw from those many legacies, practices, and sources of knowledge, without isolating artistic practices. Marguerite : le feu is my second play.
You came across the story of Marguerite Duplessis, this woman who became a model...
About ten years ago, I joined a guided tour organised by the company L’Autre Montréal, which specialises in telling the city’s lesser-known stories. That’s when I discovered the story of Marguerite Duplessis’s life and how, when she was about twenty, she fought for her freedom. I was moved by this enslaved indigenous woman and by this whole part of the history of Québec that’s been almost hidden away, when it covers almost two hundred years. Marguerite Duplessis refused to go on board a merchant ship that was to take her to Martinique, went on trial, argued that she was born of a French father and a free indigenous mother. Although she lost and disappeared to history, we can easily imagine that she was indeed deported. Hers is a very important case in the legal history of New France. She’s the first enslaved indigenous person to try to go through the courts in a colonial system. It’s important to note that everyone owned slaves in 18th-century society, and Gilles Hocquart, the then Intendant, was a major player in the human trade. Marguerite Duplessis is a great figure of activism and resistance: considered an object by the law, she claimed her rights to become a subject and defend her freedom.
Between that discovery and Marguerite : le feu, your artistic process went through several different forms.
Yes, before I turned to theatre, we recorded a series of podcasts called Marguerite : la traversée in September 2021. I knew a documentary approach was necessary, and that there would be a lot of research to do. I felt the need to pass on what I learned when meeting with judges, sexual trafficking survivors, historians, and activists. In the continuity of that process, I created an audio and performative circuit through the places of memory of the Vieux-Montréal, called Marguerite : la pierre. The city’s façades help me exhume the traces of this colonial past, offering a physical experience to the visitors, taking shape in their memories and their bodies. Those two projects, or stages, allowed us to feel free and legitimate when it came time to create for the stage. We didn’t have to explain everything, we could focus on a more visceral matter: what generates anger, deep sadness, but also a need for healing. How can we become good ancestors for future generations?
How, as a director, did you find yourself dealing with Québec’s recent history?
In 2015, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective asked me to present the Performer l’archive exhibition. For the first time, I was looking into Marguerite Duplessis’s story as an artist. At the same time, Canada’s conservative government was facing many requests by indigenous women’s associations to launch a national investigation into the status of women who had been murdered or had disappeared. Which the government refused to do. That’s when the body of Tina Fontaine, a young Anishinaabe, was found in Winnipeg’s red river. The community came together to demand justice. We were told it was a criminal case and not a systemic problem. Was it news? History? The life of Marguerite Duplessis, the lives of all those women who still disappear today. Why not count all cases of violence we see on the news? Why hide this reality and its link to the past? The trade of indigenous women and children, of Afro-descendants, of animal furs… The relationship to the economy is obvious, the fact that some families continue to enjoy privileges is true. The repercussions of the past in the present, the ramifications of slavery, the political and economic sphere, 18th-century owners and their heirs… Those links are, or are not, unconscious, but if you dig them up, they remain undeniably and obviously present. All that led me to Martinique, to learn more about Marguerite Duplessis, about the plantations where she could have been put to work as a slave… But little by little, my research transformed. I wanted to understand how her fight fed this fire passed on to the next generations, and give to hear the stories of those indigenous and Afro-descendant women. They’re witnesses to a different history of slavery and oppression, which they then pass on.
How would you describe this “fire”?
Fire is renewal but also destruction. Like Mount Pelée, this volcano in Martinique, it swallows everything when it wakes up. It is a rumbling within the earth. The image of the volcano took on a very important role in the creation of the show, because I wanted to draw a connection between the two islands of Martinique and Montreal. This magma, we also find it under Mount Royal, the hill that overlooks Montreal. Unlike Mount Pelée, it’s a volcano that never developed, thus becoming a metaphor for sleeping memories, for stories buried under our very feet. Marguerite trod the very same ground I step on. While thinking about this accumulation of geological and historical strata, I was also able to look into the psychic transmissions of those stories. We worked on how to reappropriate archives. How to bring to life through our voices and bodies the boring matter of those legal texts, written in 18th-century French? How to bring into existence a choral version of Marguerite existing at different times and embodying many different women deprived of their freedom? I wanted to bring all those Marguerite together to feel their shared history. It became a warm breach where we were able to discover powerful ties of solidarity, between us. This fire exists in the communion of those words, in the catharsis brought about on stage, in the story we listen to.
The scenography calls on natural elements. Is it a way to heal History on a larger scale?
Sound is an element I pay a lot of attention to in my artistic practice. When I start working on a creation, it most often starts with sound, by hearing voices. My investigation in Martinique failed to lead me back to Marguerite, but there was this song that came back to me. The one we sing at the end. It’s as if it had been sent to us by her, and it makes the homage of the show even more authentic. Marguerite is an invisible presence around us. She’s embodied in the sound of the Apache fiddle and Laura Ortman’s distortion effects. Her voice can be heard in the wind, in the scratching of ice, in the branches… I wanted us to reach her through our perception of natural sounds. The other performer is the land, present with us through the stage on which we perform. Under the floor of the stage, under the concrete and the foundations, there’s the earth. And under the earth, there is this subterranean volcano, and all those things connected to one another. I wanted the land to be a character which would allow us to activate the spaces between those presences, those spirits, those dead people, our ancestors. To come to the Festival d’Avignon today, knowing that the French came to North America and colonised Québec, long before the English did, is very meaningful. It’s also the story of Marguerite’s trial: her requests were always addressed to the King of France! I’m very curious and happy to have this conversation, to see what echo things will find here.
What’s next?
Right now, history curriculums are being rewritten in some universities, and there will be a section dedicated to Marguerite Duplessis. Art has a real impact. It will allow students to understand historical events in a different way. But I can’t shake this question: are people ready to give back what was taken? I think it’s a conversation that needs to happen on a global scale. When we are able to recognise our own role as privileged oppressors, what specific actions can we take to offer reparations? In the same perspective, I’m currently working with an indigenous artist from the Amazon on this question: how to be a good ally, how to handle one’s responsibility to the other? Mining and oil companies from my country go to hers to destroy her land and endanger her family. How can I shoulder my part of responsibility in this process? Should I be an observer? Try to expose them? The idea is to connect to this universal friendship.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach