Montreal Gazette: “Q&A w/Toruk creators Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon”

The Montreal Gazette is kicking their coverage of TORUK-The First Flight into high gear ahead of the show’s premiere on the 21st.

A Q&A WITH TORUK CREATORS MICHEL LEMIEUX AND VICTOR PILON
BY: BRENDAN KELLY, MONTREAL GAZETTE

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Michel Lemieux: There are moments of theatre. But it’s not theatre. It’s more of a fable, a tale, than it is a play. There are four or five pages of text in 100 minutes. There are one or two phrases here and there. I sat in the audience (during the previews in the U.S.) and I saw people watching the Storyteller even when he wasn’t talking. He tells the story sometimes without words, with gestures. And there’s a warmth in his voice. It’s almost like your grandfather telling you a story.

MG: What is it in Avatar that made you think, “OK, I can make a show out of this”?

Victor Pilon: It’s the whole idea that we’re all connected. That we have to respect each other, that we have to respect nature. If you destroy nature, you’ll destroy yourself.

ML: There’s a political aspect, too. The idea that we have to all unite. That we have different cultures, but we have to come together to find solutions to save the planet.

MG: How do you guys situate Toruk in your own work, given that you have been creating multimedia shows for years?

ML: For us, it always has to be “un coup de coeur.” If we’re going to spend a couple of years of our lives working on something, we don’t want to just do it for the gig. Whether it’s something we initiate ourselves or if a producer asks us to do a project, we don’t want to just do it for money. That’s really sad. We do it because the show has values in it that are important. We both have houses in the country and we’re really into nature and we think we have to take care of it. It’s fragile. So we have to talk about that. We had a “coup de coeur” for this. We had one for Shakespeare’s The Tempest (the basis for their show of the same name), for Norman McLaren (the filmmaker who inspired their show Norman).

VP: For me, there’s no difference between doing a show for the Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts on Norman McLaren and doing a Cirque show. We’re aware the venues are different, that the audiences are different. But the work we did with Norman nourishes our work with the Cirque.

ML: Filmmakers make films that are often quite different from film to film.

MG: But there are some filmmakers who make films that have much in common.

VP: When we did the retrospective of our work at the (Montreal) Museum of Fine Arts last year …

ML: We saw videos of our shows from the past 30 years. And my fear was that there would be no link between them. But I watched the videos and I saw an evolution. You see the same themes, the same colours, the same esthetic, in a little show, in a Cirque du Soleil show, in a show on the street for 200,000 people. And people who know us will see our signature in Toruk.

MG: What is that signature?

ML: It’s an integration of different media. We’re purists of multidisciplinary art. There are people that do theatre and add a little video. There are people who do dance who add a little theatre. Us, we put all of these things on the same level and then we integrate them.

MG: You have that in common with the Cirque. They mix up art forms too. They’re not really a circus — they produce shows with a bit of the circus, with dance, with music.

VP: It’s really about what we have to say and how we’re going to move the audience.

{ SOURCE: The Montreal Gazette | http://goo.gl/6wMnXg }