Dr. Siminovitch, Mr. and Mrs. Comper, Founders of the Siminovitch Prize, members of the Jury, Jacoba Knappen, Andrea Lundy, John Van Burek, , Blair, Andrew, Joanne, everyone at BMO and all the people who are making this evening happen, thank you so much. This honour means so much to me and to my community. Most of all it means a great deal to my mother.

When I was a girl, I wanted to be an actor for five or six minutes. Mom had taken this parent effectiveness training and knew exactly the right thing to say that would encourage me to follow my dreams while balancing them with an application to teacher’s college. My father didn’t take parent effectiveness training, and responded with “hm.” I followed his advice and abandoned the idea becoming a schoolteacher. Mom gave me a look up and down, shook her head and said, “alright, go do it.”

Later that year I went to Gordon Jones who used to run this summer Shakespeare out of the university. I said, half in jest, “How’s about letting me direct the show” and he said “No.” And then he picked up his big set of theatre keys and he brought me downstairs to the dressing room. And he unlocked the room and he said “this can be your pit, work with the actors down here.” I remember staring at him like he’d just given me a million dollars. “What?” he said “Go do it”. I was Gordon’s assistant director on the Summer Shakespeares then for six years.

So anyway, through all of that I did follow Dad’s advice and go to theatre school, which I did here in Toronto, up on Steeles there. While we were there, Chris Tolley and I wrote a show together called “In Your Dreams, Freud”, a musical farce about the very doctrines we were learning – an slap in the face of modern psychology, Aristotle, young love, Broadway hits and theatre school itself.
We were very proud of ourselves.
We went to the department heads and said we’d like to produce it.
They said “you’ll have to do it outside of class time”
We said ” Ok”
They said “You don’t have any time outside of class time”
We said ” we can make it work”
They said ” officially that’s not a good idea. Here are the keys to the theatre. Go do it.”

So I graduated and I said, I’d like to work at the professional theatre. So I went in and I hassled Lois Brown, who is here tonight, also shortlisted for this award. Lois was running the Resource Centre for the Arts, known as the Hall and was extremely busy and I called and I called and I dropped by and dropped by again and I said “how’s about hiring me for the summer.”
And she said “what do you want to do?”
and I said ‘I want to do a big cabaret project that includes all members of the St. John’s arts community, senior artists and emerging artists on the same bill and every night would be a theme night and we will serve theme food and we will send cheques at the end of the summer to everyone who performed even if it is only for 17$ which is what it turned out to be. And Lois said, “Alright, go do it.” Lois, I was so proud to be on the shortlist with you, and I’ve got the opportunity to thank you here in front of all these people as you were one of my mentors so thank you and I love you and I’m really lucky to have forced you to hire me.

So I stayed with the hall then for nigh on seven years. And Lois said we’ve got to keep all these cabaret people still coming and performing at the hall, especially the emerging artists. So I blew the dust off “In Your Dreams Freud”. We produced it and then as a spin off the production team remounted it a second, third and fourth time, as well as a short tour. That production team was the new company that became Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, and that’s the company I still am AD of today.

In my tenure at the Hall, I met many people who now work with Artistic Fraud, and one of those people is Ann Brophy. Every successful theatre company has an Ann. Sometimes she’s called a Mallory or a David or a Gaylene or a Sherrie, or a GM or a Producer. You’d think the best attribute of someone like Ann is that she can balance a budget down to the cent, but the best thing about Ann is that a few times a year our Ann says “this project is difficult. How can we make it happen?” Our Ann is a visionary who thinks equal parts expansion and viability. I am thankful for Ann.

So Anyway, this form we’ve been working on is called Kaleidography, like a Kaleidoscope. For the first show, we took Bach’s fugue in G Minor you know the one, la la la. This fugue is made up of one line that splits into 2 lines that splits into 3 then 6 lines. We took those lines and instead of applying tonal values to them we applied action values and kept the same harmonic notions, and time values. We invented a plot, a group of schoolchildren cheating on a math exam. In our piece, we replaced harmonizing notes with harmonizing actions. So the goal was to trace the lines and patterns in the music with visible story lines. We needed a group that was large enough to create the patterns which were best seen in a grid formation and the grid formation needed to be at least 9×9 to accommodate the stories. 81 Actors. So I went to the people who run Sound Symposium in St. John’s and I said “I’m not sure that this will work, but what would you say if I said… “well, what I said to you guys here a minute ago. And the sound symposium said “alright – go do it”

So on we went then, trying to progress this form and apply it in all of these different ways, visual and story based productions using the physics type rules of music. We’d only done a small bunch of productions like it when I met Rumble Theatre’s Norman Armour at a PACT conference. I believe we had both snuck out of a heated Equity/Pact argument and headed to the bar. There he tried to explain to me how to play snooker. Mystified by snooker, I explained to him Kaleidography, and a new show that we’d developed called Under Wraps, and a version of Jesus Christ Superstar that used the score of the musical to build the pictures from which we blocked the show. I remember Norman found this very funny, but within three months he had arranged for me to come to Vancouver to share my findings. That was six years ago, and the first time I’d taught what we were figuring out. I am still mystified and bowled over by Norman’s act of faith in bringing me to Vancouver. I am still mystified and bowled over by snooker.

Acts of faith categorize all the rest of it, from Canada Council officers and juries to touring presenters. Five companies right across the country took us on for our first professional tour. At the time they had no reason to have faith in me or in Artistic Fraud. And let me tell you Artistic Fraud is not a handy name if you want to cash a large cheque or when you want someone to buy your 24 person experiment in using actors as symphony. But they said, “ok, if you can get it here, we’ll put it up for you” We had to pull every string attached to every human being; political, familial — people who’d never heard of us, people we’d never heard of. We had our picture taken with the minister of culture recreation and youth, now recreation, youth, mines, fisheries and culture. After the snap of us holding the cheque, we pleaded with him to make a personal call to the oil companies on our behalf. We had one month left to raise the money, 24 contractees, and a five-week tour booked and signed for. We were short $27,000 of a $140000 tour. Another week ticked by, we had to drop the Yukon off the itinerary. Short $16000 three weeks before we left for Calgary. Our tour manager reduces our room bookings by 1/3rd by rebooking our double hotel rooms to be three person suites with a pull out. Short 8,000$, one week til Christmas day, two weeks one day til the plane takes off with us on it. Or not on it. We’ll give up the rental vans, we’ll cut up the set and put it in the cast’s luggage, we’ll drop the directors, stage managers and playwrights fees. Already done that. We’ll…. We’ll…. We get a call from Petro Canada. Merry Christmas.

All of the artists I’ve depended on to put these shows together demonstrated the greatest amount of faith. “Um, yeah, what would you say if we replaced all the text in Chekhov’s Seagull with instruments from a string quartet, and had the actors speak their interpretations of the lines which would then be imitated tonally by a violin or a cello, and then eventually replace the actors voice, demonstrating the music in meaning behind language.”
“Uh. Ok”
“Yeah Um, what would you say if we did this piece in front of a bunch of panels so that it looked like the actors’ shadows were on the walls behind them, but in fact the shadows are other actors exactly imitating the actors in the front of the panels – but when the characters in front of the panels lie the shadows diverge.”
“OK”
“What would happen if we put actors in a booth and cast audience members in the character parts who would be linked to the actors on headset, and the audience/actor lines would be run off a timing system so the audience would discover the story of the play as they spoke it themselves?”
“Alright, let’s go do it”

I am so grateful for the openness and trust from these actors, musicians, designers, managers and technicians. Because sometimes the ideas sound a little out to lunch – but these artists come with me all the way. I’ve also had the good fortune to work outside of the company with generous and open groups like Sheila’s Brush and Theatre Newfoundland Labrador. All of these artists I’ve met have set the parameters for future projects- questions they ask become answers in the next season.

There are two special people from that group of artists. The first is Robert Chafe. Robert and I grew up in the same small town in Newfoundland, but never met because he is Protestant and I am Catholic, and in small town Newfoundland in the 70’s those were the two solitudes. Eventually we got around to working together, and have not parted since. Roberts ideas spark flames on frivolous notions I come up with, and next thing you know it’s a full-on production. By rights, I should take the circular saw to this, and give half to Robert but he’s also my room mate so the trophy is safe. Robert is a genius, and Robert don’t go quoting that back to me when I’m asking you to make a cut in a script some time. I love you honey, this is yours too.

And the second person I will talk about is another director who makes things happen, and who is the recipient of the $25,000 part of this award. She is a graduate of the National Theatre School directing programme, and has already started two theatre companies in Newfoundland. She was the inaugural directing student accepted to the Stratford Festival’s Conservatory programme. She has a brilliant skill as a producer, and was in fact the mastermind behind that big tour I told you about. She teaches at the National Theatre School, and is a treasure to her students. She was my assistant director and my co-director on several productions. This woman has taught me a lot about acting and about text, but most importantly this. There have been hard times over the past 10 years I’ll admit it. Times when I’ve thought about giving it up. This woman is someone who never gave up, and I’ve often looked at her and thought, well if she’s tough enough, then I’m tough enough too. She has a brilliant light guiding her because she believes that theatre should happen. That theatre must happen. She is someone to whom I am so happy to say “alright girl, go do it.” Ladies and Gentlemen I’m pleased to introduce to you Danielle Irvine.

First of all, permit me to express my profound gratitude to the founders of the Siminovitch Prize. Thank you, Lou – and thanks as well to the late Elinore Siminovitch. Your work inspired this prize which is so unique, so generous, and so prestigious.

Thanks to BMO Financial Group for supporting this prize, and to its employees for organizing this evening. A very special thank to Andrew Soren.

All my gratitude to the members of the jury: Leonard McHardy, Geneviève Billette, Katrina Dunn, Valerie Moore, and Carlo Guillermo Proto. A very special thank-you to Carlo Guillermo Proto and Geneviève Billette who worked very hard to produce the video that you just saw.

I would like of course to thank Paul Lefebvre, who presented my nomination, and did it in such an eloquent and generous fashion.

Finally, permit me to thank my companion Stéphan, who over the last fifteen years has so often shown me love, support, and encouragement. Without his company, his pride in my work, and his encouragement in difficult moments, I probably wouldn’t be here tonight.

When they told me that I was the winner, I couldn’t sleep for a week!
This prize truly means an enormous amount to me.

It honours me and it honours all the communities that have given me love and support over the last thirty years of artistic work: the Franco-Ontarian community of course — those of Ottawa, Hawkesbury, Rockland, Timmins, Hearst and of course that of Sudbury, and more particularly the one that surrounds Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario; but also the community of Toronto, where we played Le Chien in English. The French-Canadian community, within which I have so often been active.

And finally, the communities of Montreal, of Quebec City, and of Quebec in general.
I dedicate this prize to them, and to all those who, like all of you here this evening, believe that art — if it doesn’t change the world — at least relieves the deafening silence of solitude.

As far back as I can remember, theatre has been a part of my life.

In the audience, as a child, I had the good fortune to experience certain powerful aesthetic shocks. I remember the one occasioned by the Marat-Sade that Peter Brook directed in 1963: the show, which I probably didn’t understand, struck me as hard as a whip all the same. I also remember Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789, which made me float on a little burning cloud for weeks.

Since then, I can’t count the strong emotions that I have experienced while sitting in a theatre, here or elsewhere.

Theatre has the effect on me of a cut, of a burn, of a punch, of a lash. Theatre stimulates me, upsets me, and can even enrage me.

Theatre has always given me the desire to live, to create, to stand up and fight.
In short, theatre inspires every feeling in me except that of comfort.

Since childhood, I have belonged to amateur, school, and community theatre groups. And yet, I never imagined myself directing. In fact, when I was young I didn’t know that directing could be a job!

(And even today, I sometimes doubt that it is one!)

In the family environment in which I grew up – my parents had received only a cursory education – there could be no question of an artistic or intellectual life. Moreover, I belong to one of the first generations of women who had access to higher education.

In the era in which I entered university, I had before me almost no models of women choosing a career, never mind an artistic career.

To make theatre for a (more or less successful) living – to define oneself as an artist – thus seemed to me both completely mysterious, and totally unattainable.

In fact, thanks surely to wonderful teachers who understood how to share their passion for words, I was awakened very early to literature, and my secret adolescent fantasy might have been to become Simone de Beauvoir: for her books, her intelligence… and maybe also for her crimson nails, her cigarettes, and her relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and St-Germain-des-Prés!

It may be that even then, it was the necessity of speaking that motivated me. In any case, words and ideas were the substrata of my artistic life.

The words of writers and poets: from William Faulkner to Antonin Artaud, from Flannery O’Connor to Krista Wolf, from Marcel Proust to Carson McCullers, from Sylvia Plath to Margaret Atwood, from Ingeborg Bachmann to Michael Ondatje, from Jean Marc Dalpé to Louise Dupré.These words – and those of playwrights, of course. But when I make theatre, I turn first of all to literature and poetry.

I don’t remember at all how I found myself at the Ecole de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. It was relatively late: I was already almost 25, and had my university studies behind me…

I don’t know what I was looking for there. In any case, certainly not to make a career, in the traditional sense of the word.

I hadn’t imagined my future after school, either. Nor that I would have to leave my country of origin in order that theatre could become my whole life.

The shock represented for me by my first contact with the Franco-Ontarian artistic community was immense. At that time (1977-), theatre was intimately linked with a wide-ranging societal project. It was linked to a collective desire to speak.
We had the impression that the sky was wide open before us, and in the words of the poet Robert Dickson (who was taken from us much too soon), our landscape was the one from his poem:

In the north of our lives
Here
Where distance wears down hearts full
of the mineral tenderness of the
land of stone, forests and cold

We
stubborn, underground and together
let fly our rough and rocky cries
to the four winds of the possible future

It was about speaking; giving a voice to those who didn’t have one; putting characters onstage who belonged to the race of the forgotten. It was about naming the country, the people, giving them pride and confidence.

We spent an enormous amount of time in the working-class communities of Hawkesbury and Sudbury, meeting textile workers and miners, listening to their stories, in order to write them down and put them onstage.

I directed the stories that we were writing, but I did it a bit by default, as no one else wanted to do it. What was important to me at the time, and still is, was the simple need to speak;to express a world; and to share it with someone… with some… well, with the audience.

Now, of course, we are no longer in a period where it seems indispensable to name ourselves and to put ourselves onstage as a community. Since that time, I have brought to the stage many texts of very diverse origins, from Camus to Beckett, from Feydeau to Koltès. I have worked in many theatres, large and small.
Since that time, I have left Ontario, for Montreal; Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, for the Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale (NCT); and institutions, for liberty.

I founded the company Sibyllines ten years ago in order to bring to the stage contemporary works of a theatrical or literary nature, and to make other voices heard. In order to do so in the best possible artistic conditions. The quality of the process of creation is, it seems to me, as fundamental as its result.

Over the years, and (perhaps to an even greater extent) in the context of the liberty that Sibyllines permits me, directing has thus become for me a form of writing. Through the words of others, or through the silences that are left to me.

Today, I love more than anything to make silence be heard. The silence of writers who paid with their lives for their violent combat with words: Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann, Virginia Woolf.

The silence between words; that of bodies. The silence of powerlessness; the silence of violence.

Actually it seems to me that theatre is, in a completely paradoxical way, as much a place of silence as of speech. One of the only places where you can still think as a community.

After thirty years of active work, directing always seems to me to be an enormous privilege. A privilege to promote the circulation, in the collective imagination, of words and signs that will perhaps open the hearts of the audience, and perhaps give them cause to reflect on the world in which we live.

A privilege to have such a fruitful and enriching relationship with the audience.

A privilege to find myself in a rehearsal room surrounded by books, scripts, actors, and designers, in an incredibly intense atmosphere of sharing and of solidarity. To have the pleasure of discussing, of delving into the scripts, of searching for the best way to represent them onstage. To spend hours with the actors searching for the best gesture, the best movement.

Permit me to salute here all the artisans, designers, and actors who have shared my road for the last thirty years, and particularly for the last ten years. All those who have put their talent, their energy, and their openness into the service of the works and the projects, with complete confidence and complete abandon.

But this privilege and this liberty have come at a price: and it is, I won’t deny it, a high price. We live in a country where art is disappearing from public and governmental priorities. We live in a country that sometimes copies its workings and its concerns from those of its great neighbour, and that abandons its responsibilities for the development and support of artists to the laws of the market or to the vagaries of private sponsorship.

In this country, very few individuals can live from their art, and of course only a few can live from directing. In order to devote myself exclusively to the theatre, I, like many others, had to make choices, among which were to run a company, to take on numerous responsibilities alone, from writing press releases to accounting, fundraising, and other activities, each one more creative than the last.

Faced with the amount of work I need to accomplish in order to properly carry out the projects that I take on; faced with the price to be paid for the privilege of being a director who chooses her own adventures – sometimes I feel discouraged and exhausted. Sometimes, also, I feel like I can’t breathe.

A prize like the Siminovitch Prize is a wonderful stimulant, a wonderful encouragement, both symbolic and material. Perhaps this encouragement is even more intense when it arrives in the middle part of your life, at the moment when you are mature and in full possession of your artistic means.

Let us hope that the provincial and federal governments uphold their responsibilities as much as generous donors like yourselves do.

It’s our job – all of us – to demand a fair place for art, for theatre, for writing, for dramaturgy, for creation, so that we as a community can sustain our hope of a society that is more just and more human, more mutually supportive, more open, and more intelligent.

One of the marvellous aspects of the Siminovitch Prize is the possibility of supporting individuals or groups in order to salute their talent. This opportunity is even more important given that this period is particularly perilous for all emerging talents. Today, access to resources for young creators is, in large measure, out of reach.

It’s extraordinary to be able to play fairy godmother!! So I have the pleasure to present to you my laureates. I have chosen two of them, full of talent and energy.

First of all: Francis Monty, Olivier Ducas, and David Lavoie, who for years now have been running a company called La Pire Espèce, dedicated to théâtre d’objets ; a theatre that is inventive, playful, and extraordinarily infectious. La Pire Espèce puts words at the heart of its approach. They are a talented, brilliant, and incredibly dynamic company. Unfortunately, they are currently on tour in France!

My second protégé is Christian Lapointe. He is a creator originally from Quebec; he studied directing at the National Theatre School; and it was at this time, while serving as his mentor, that I discovered his talent, his intelligence, his rigour, and his pugnacity. He thereafter founded the company for which he so successfully writes, directs, and acts. He devotes himself completely to his art, and he does it with brio to spare. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of introducing to you, Christian Lapointe.