“This has nothing to do with a dream, except for drawing from the dream itself its rigorous illogicality, its way of representing the night to the lies of the day, a kind of freshness that makes our routine fade. It is also realistic in the sense that realism means painting with accuracy the intrigues of a universe unique to each artist and without the slightest relation to what is generally considered to be reality. It is also disobedience to dead rules, a tribute to all those who want to remain free" Jean Cocteau about the movie "Testament of Orpheus" 1961.
Directed by Gilles Maheu, one of the most acclaimed directors of contemporary Canadian theater, the Carbone 14 Company is usually based in Montreal. Revealing himself in 1982 with the performance L’Homme Rouge, immediately hailed by Montreal critics as a small masterpiece, Maheu is the creator of a theater of strong and sensual movement, a sort of "cathartic" theater where the actor frees his emotions to recombine them within a poetic and violent gesturality. Suspended between mime, dance, spoken theater, and video, it is a total theater where the scenography, always very enveloping and spectacular, becomes dramatic writing in space.
Criticism of consumption stereotypes (Pain Blanc, 1981), denouncement of physical and moral brutality (Le Rail, 1983/84), reflections on revolution (Marat-Sade, 1984), on the tragic conclusions of great collective destinies (Le Titanic, 1985), questioning the role of the individual in the bureaucratic system (Opium, 1987), disturbing and fragmented vision of ideologies (Hamlet-Machine, 1987), are inscribed, as living metaphors, in this incessant search for human becoming. In Les Dortoirs, Gilles Maheu started from a class photo and his memories of the dormitory at the Marieville convent where he lived for many years.
Fragments of stories are composed in a horizontal assembly. They are traces of the history of an entire generation exposed within a non-traditional narrative structure. In Les Dortoirs, a succession of scenes and snapshots bring to light fragments of daily life, childhood memories, and political and cultural events experienced and suffered by people of the same age. Les Dortoirs is a theater of image and movement that composes, recomposes, and overlaps dreamlike programs in a painful and fascinating circular flow.
