Christian Lapointe
At the age of 30, Christian Lapointe seems to be in permanent uproar, in constant reflection on his theatre practice. Trained at the Conservatoire de Québec then at the École nationale de theatre, the young artistic director of the Théâtre Péril started by staging texts by Yeats, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Claude Gauvreau and Mark Ravenhill, between conventional theatre and installation, traditional acting and performance art. With S.H.C., presented as a reading at the Festival d'Avignon 2006 , he used his own words and made his mark. But his vocation, he points out, is "to be a director and bring together the right individuals". That is why he founded the collective of creators CINAPS, to find the means of genuine theatre writing. He considers the text a material, "like gel for the lighting designer." "Together, we try to bring out what is there underneath, like a narrative frame, like pictorial space, like mental space." Rather than telling a story, Christian Lapointe seeks to create foundations so that the spectator can weave his own narrative threads. A victim, when he was 19, of an accident that brought him to the burn unit of a hospital, he has a singular relationship with fire. It is based on his fascination with this element that he invites us into S.H.C. to develop a whole societal and philosophical reflection.