André Brassard, 1946-2022 | The architect of modern Quebec theater is no more

Luke Boulanger
Press

This announcement created a sensation. On social networks, Prime Minister François Legault emphasized the loss of “his colleague, the great director who created the majority of the plays of Michel Tremblay”.

“We will miss your immense talent, your superior intelligence and your vision of the world,” wrote Danielle Lorraine, who, like her mother, Denise Filliatreault, worked with André Brassard. On its Facebook page, the Duceppe theater spoke of a “huge loss to the Quebec theater world.”

The rebellion was effective

A cultured and passionate artist, André Brassard is a genius at staging. During his greatest creative period, from the 1960s to the 1990s, he discovered a language, aesthetic and picturesque practice unmatched in Quebec until a certain Robert Lepage. A brilliant and intelligent man, with sometimes brutal clarity, he was a non-conformist artist. Knowing this, Brassard liked to disobey. In his life as in his art.

André Brassard influenced generations of designers. Thanks to him (and Michel Tremblay), Quebec theater ceased to have an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe. In between, Brassard plays his idol, Jean Genet, as the badass, rebel, rebel.

“It is not a virtue: it is because I am, and always will be, unable to obey. If I am asked to do such a thing, I should know why,” he said in an interview with the newspaper. See In 1998, as part of the 30th anniversary of its creation daughter-in-law

“If there’s a closed door, I’m going to go there and see,” he told our colleague Alexandre Vigneault again in 2010. He also talks about his love-hate relationship with the theatrical environment: “We’re in a bullshit environment and I hate it, bullshit. I will never be chosen as Miss Canada, I have no glory to save. »

Art like balm

André Brassard was born in Montreal in 1946 to a “daughter-mother”. A scandal during Quebec’s holy water bath! To preserve the honor of the family, the baby is handed over to the uncle and aunt. When she was young, her real mother pretended to be her aunt and showed her no affection except when she was alone with her son. As a consequence “caresses a big deficit”, he is confident, adults. “My story is complicated, but I feel like an orphan. To heal his childhood wounds, Brassard finds a balm in art… but also in an artificial paradise.

As a teenager, Brassard was introduced to the boards at Sainte-Marie College. In the seventh year, he performed the first number Imaginary illness. To achieve this, he calls the then star actor Jean Gascon. A young student sought the advice of the director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. In 1965, at the age of 19, Brassard produced his first (real) production for the amateur group Les Saltimbanks. Black mass. The following year, he founded the Contemporary Movement. He was already running a genet, Good people, for his muse and friend Rita LaFontaine. The actress introduces him to a vulnerable person he encounters in aspiring theaters, a linotypist who wants to become a writer: Michel Tremblay. The rest is history.

In July 1965, Tremblay and Brassard went to see Cain, by Pierre Patrie, at the Théâtre Saint-Denis. And they hate this film from the avant-garde Quebec director. Although they appreciate its realism, the two young men are frustrated by the language spoken on screen: a cross between Parisianism and the French spoken in Quebec; “A Frenchman from the Mid-Atlantic », They joke. The idea for a famous play was hatched in the brain of Michel Tremblay at the Montreal Jewel. Three weeks later, the author’s first version arrived daughter-in-law In Brassard. But it would take three years for a company called Rideau Vert to create a play with 15 women.

The Brassard-Tremblay duo

In August 1968, the creation of this piece in Rideau Vert had the effect of an artistic bombshell! An eruption that will be felt for several decades. “I sometimes wonder what I would have become if this work had not come my way,” wrote Brassard in his foreword to Mario Girard’s book, The Sisters-in-Law: The Work That Changed Everything. “I probably directed a small theater and organized a show. But having a writer in my life that I wanted to work with gave my journey a remarkable direction. »

The duo would rule Quebec theater for decades, with productions on the chain: Tomorrow morning, Montreal awaits me, Hosanna, Duchess of Langeis, Forever yours, your Mary-Lou, Hello, there, hello, Saint Carmen of the Hand, Albertine in five steps, The real world? For 35 years, he signed all the creations of the prolific Tremblay.

In addition to his complexity in the work of Michel Tremblay, the director also performed the classics: Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine, Tchekov, Beckett.. in In the 1980s, he signed the creation of key pieces by Michel Marc Bouchard, Normand Chauret and, later, Olivier Chonier.

André Brassard was also involved in the founding of the Center du Théâtre d’Azurd’Huy in 1968. He directed the French Theater of the Center National des Arts from 1983 to 1989. For eight years, he worked as a pilot in the French department of the National Theater School. of Canada. He made cult films in the 1970s Françoise Durocher, Waitress, The sun rises late And Once upon a time in the East.

In 1999, his career was brutally interrupted by an illness (stroke). She will stop with her performance at Space Go in 2009Oh good days!, With Andre Lachapelle, “this gift from God to suffering humanity”, he liked to say about the actress who disappeared in November 2019.

A coming out And a controversy

In the spring of 1972, Brassard traveled to France with Tremblay. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival Once Upon a Time in the East. At a press conference, a French journalist asked them a trending question: “Why are you attracted to the marginalized? » Brassard’s obvious answer: « Maybe because we are gay. »

Back then, no one talked about their sexual orientation in public. The gesture of the two artists appears heroic in the eyes of the pioneers of the LGBTQ+ cause. However, his appeal to (too) young people would catch up with Brassard eight years later. In 1975, police searched his home and seized photos of naked boys and young men aged 14 to 20 who were part of a prostitution ring. Sentenced to 90 days in jail for most weekends.

A devastating stroke

In 1999, Brassard suffered a stroke that left him confined to his chair. He retained his entire head, but his physical abilities were greatly diminished. At just 53 years old, he will never be the same again. “It’s annoying, I find it difficult to read, to think,” he told his biographer Guillaume Corbil. I think it’s expensive to pay my young follies. I feel like a dead man at the time of borrowing. If you have to stop living to keep living, it’s not worth it. »

A year after her stroke, she was awarded the Denis-Pelletier Prize in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the performing arts and Quebec theatre. As he received his prize from the Quebec government, André Brassard, frail in his armchair, his voice weak and trembling, quoted Albert Camus as saying: “The only power we have is to prevent, to slow down, the destruction of the world. »

In 2004, director Masques received another tribute award at the evening. That same year, he told Wajdi Mouwad in a book of interviews, I’m bad! For Brassard, “the theater remains the only place where human beings encounter other human beings in the hope that something will happen,” he told the current director of the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris, who was once his student at the National Theater School.

In his own way, André Brassard is also a god to our suffering humanity.