BoucheWHACKED! Theatre Collective is back in action. 2020 began with a series of translation commissions. During this current period of uncertainty, it is with a special gratitude to Canada Council for the Arts allowing us to support freelance and independent artists.
Francophone Canadian playwrighting is on forefront of international playwriting – their work is translated and presented all over the world. It is particularly hard to describe the unique “Langue D’Auteur” created by Francophone Canadian artists as there is nothing quite like it in Western English Language theatre. Imagine Shakespeare, Moliere, Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp smashed together on the page. The poetic or expressionistic are side by side with gritty realism and the mundane often becomes the fantastical. Ancient words, made up words, verse, prose, Joual (everyday Quebecois), other francophone dialects, all literary devices, often the live next to each other on the page.
CENTRE D’ACHATS
By Emmanuelle Jimenez | Translated by Johanna Nutter
Searching, finding, buying, again and again: the t-shirt, the earrings, the dog, the rabbit, the snake, the flying carpet… In search of comfort, seven women of divers background and ages dive desperately into a whirlwind of outrageous consumption. Seven prisoners of the shopping mall, each of them encounters her destiny.
Emmanuelle Jimenez examines shopping malls as both symbols of our collective alienation but also of our need for community. The need to share, to communicate, to feel surrounded, then confronts the need to consume more and more of the same things, at the risk of finding our souls bruised and our dreams shattered.
“This is one of the best texts of the new season… A hard-hitting play by Emmanuelle Jimenez.” – Mario Cloutier, La Presse +
Meet the playwright
Emmanuelle Jimenez
Emmanuelle Jimenez trained in performance at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal. While continuing working as an actor, she devoted herself to writing. Among her plays include Oui, madame la ministre! (Productions À Tour de Rôle), Du vent entre les dents (Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui), Un gorille à Broadway (Productions À Tour de Rôle), Rêvez, montagnes! (Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental) and Le dénominateur commun co-written with François Archambault (Théâtre Debout). She has led numerous cultural projects, including with La Maison Bleu in Côte-des-Neiges and the Montreal North Cultural and Community House. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Festival du jamais Lu from 2003 to 2010 and has been a member of the AQAD Board of Directors since 2014.
Meet the translator
Johanna Nutter
Johanna Nutter is artistic director of creature/creature, a polymorphic company born of Nutter’s passion for blurring lines between established divisions. Her work has toured extensively throughout her home province of Quebec, across Canada and internationally, in both English and French, to such venues as Soho Theatre (London), The Pleasance (Edinburgh), Les Halles (Brussels), and La Licorne (Montreal). Known for her intimate and personal collaborations, recent works include Tree Hug, OSCAR, and the multi-award winning my pregnant brother/my playwright sister (2009 – 2018). She won the PWM/Cole Emerging Translator award and brought CHLORINE (Longpré & Michon), which produced and directed at The Centaur (Brave New Looks 2016). She is currently working on texts by Annick Lefèbvre, Guillaume Corbeil, and Étienne Lepage.
This translation was made possible by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts.
