On Wednesday, 11 August 2021, at 11am EDT, Stephen Johnson talked with Gabrielle Houle about her first experiences with Performance--her 'First Gatherings.' A recording of that conversation is included below, in full. Gabrielle is a teacher, performer, director and designer, who has studied commedia and mask-making, and has interviewed many of the master creators of masks in Italy, France and Switzerland as part of her research projects. You can find out more about her life, career, scholarship and performance practice here.
Gabrielle was born and raised in the province of Québec, spending most of her childhood first in Boucherville, then in Québec City. Her earliest memory of performance is her attendance, when she was 5 or 6 (c1986), at an outdoor puppet show. She does not remember the story, but she remembers that she saw the performance looking down from above. She remembers only one character, Coquette the Skunk, who was pre-occupied with her appearance, and the fact that no one appreciated her perfume. She was so taken with this character that it became a part of her ongoing conversation with her parents at home, and a part of her family life, to refer to her; even today, Coquette will be referred to by her family when they smell a skunk. She was at this time given a puppet of a skunk, a prized possession that she still has.
The second experience in the theatre that Gabrielle remembers was also puppetry, though very different. It was a performance of Le secret de Miris, produced by Théâtre de l'Avant-Pays in 1987, when she was 6 years old, at La Maison Théâtre, a venerable theatre for young audiences. She attended this production twice, once with her school, and once with her parents. What she remembers of this experience is very different from her first memory--she remembers that it was slow, and dark, that she had a feeling of confusion while watching it. She remembers that she didn't like it, although she was taken twice, she believes because it was a high-profile production by a well-known company. But she does remember one set-piece very well: a rock that was illuminated from inside, an image that mystified her. This performance clearly had a far different effect than that first puppet-show, though in its way it was just as memorable.
Though not a performance, Gabrielle remembered a third event as a significant episode in her relationship with performance. In 1987, she went with her parents on a trip to Europe that included Venice, where she remembers, vividly, going into a street-level, storefront mask-making workshop. Her parents each purchased traditional commedia masks, and she was allowed to purchase one as well. She remembers how difficult it was to choose, and finally picking one covered with feathers. Along with Coquette, she still has this mask.
We turned from Gabrielle's early memories of attending theatre, to doing theatre. Until she majored in theatre at Laval University, Gabrielle's performance practice was entirely extra-curricular. She took courses in Montréal, at a Community Arts organization called Nos Voix Nos Visages (which still exists). When she moved to Quebec City at the age of 9 or 10, she was involved in extracurricular classes at Les Ateliers Imagine, in the city's old town, where she took classes in both theatre and visual arts. While she was actively involved in theatre at both her high school and in her CEGEP, these too were primarily extra-curricular.
We talked in particular about her experiences at her Catholic High School, where she was taught by nuns, who organized an active and wide-ranging series of productions out of class
time. These included Les Fridolinades, a well-known satirical review series by Gratien Gélinas that had run from 1938-46, that contained many political references she knows she did not understand. And it included a production of Les Belles-sœurs, by Michel Tremblay, a play with themes and language that she would have thought would have made it unsuitable to a Catholic school; but while some language may have been altered for this audience, she has no memory of extraordinary censorship. This production in particular, she wrote to me afterward, 'speaks to an openness from the school and its understanding of the importance of this play for Québécois and Canadian theatre.' The school also produced Twelve Angry Men (by Reginald Rose) and Chantecler (by Edmond Rostand), among other plays that exposed her to a broad range of styles, and to the full history of theatre, all produced with all-female casts.
Gabrielle acknowledged the important influence of her Great-Aunt, who was an art conservationist, and a nun who lived in the main convent for the same religious order as those who taught her in school. Her Aunt loved vaudeville, loved to improvise, and was a keen performer who often acted in productions produced at the convent, usually playing the male roles. She encouraged Gabrielle's love of art and theatre, talked with her often about it, loved to hear about Gabrielle's studies, and about her work on masks. Her Great-Aunt, as Gabrielle says, gave her strong advice as a young adult--to become more involved in comedy, and not the serious drama that she favoured as a teenager. From the age of twenty, this advice changed her life.
Gabrielle wanted to end our conversation (as others have in these interviews) with an acknowledgement of the importance of a specific production that was life-changing to her as a young adult. In 2001, also at the age of twenty, she attended Montreal's Festival TransAmériques (FTA), and witnessed Rwanda94, a multi-media production about the Rwandan genocide. It included giant puppets, raw video reporting, docudrama performances, and eyewitness accounts by survivors, sitting on stage and speaking from the audience. It was a kind of theatre that she had not seen before, and that made her realize how strong the visceral, the emotional effect of live performance can be, how much it can make us understand a historical event, as compared with the distancing effects of learning about these events by other means, through newspapers and television.
She ends the interview by saying that she still thinks about this performance, randomly as she walks, and reflects on its effect on her, then and now.
A full transcript will be posted later.