Doing away with abstract and cerebral themes, his stage is a series of tableaux in which the everyday tragedies of rape and death play out alongside the large-scale human devastation of 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami. In the darkened theatre, we are all accountable for what transpires onstage. There are no innocent bystanders, only silent witnesses. St-Pierre wants people — dares them — to interact with the performance, and sometimes he succeeds. In a scene where golden-tressed nymphs shed their disguises and evolve into men, slapping themselves across the face, a woman stands up and tells them to stop. It is a moment of collective catharsis that blurs the line between art and reality.
Contrasting violence with compassion, St-Pierre explores the ecstasy and heartbreak of intimate relationships. He treats sex lightly, but takes love very seriously, wiping the Vaseline-smeared lens clear of romantic cliché. The body is at once horrific and hauntingly beautiful, capable of destruction and abuse, but also tenderness and vulnerability. Its movements are painfully transparent, pulsing with the conflicting urges of selflessness and self-interest. Holding on is torture; letting go is out of the question. Desperately beckoning her lover, a dancer pulls an invisible thread until she frantically unspools a whole history between them. Gesturing wildly and flinging themselves with acrobatic abandon, another couple engages in a pas de deux as if going to battle, their only armour a layer of skin.
But what to make of the soul once it is bared? How to interpret its desires? Standing naked and alone on a chair at stage right in La porno, St-Pierre confesses to the audience: “I’m scared that I won’t leave a mark. I’m scared that I’ll never fall in love again. I’m scared to fall in love. I’m afraid to forget, afraid of being forgotten. I’m scared to never hold again, never make love again, only to fuck. I’m scared of pain, of inflicted pain. I’m scared of being sad. I’m scared of dying before my mother, before my father. I’m afraid of not being inspired anymore, to never again have glimmering eyes. But what I’m most scared of above all is to not be loved.”
Two weeks after the show in Quebec City, St-Pierre beckons me into his home with a half-eaten bowl of cereal in hand. It’s three in the afternoon, and he has just woken up. The apartment is dim and quiet, overlooking a tree-lined street in Montreal’s east end, where panhandlers and young families share the sidewalks. The space feels occupied but not quite lived in, and St-Pierre admits that the urge to settle down and decorate has only hit him in the past six months. Directing me to a yellow vintage sofa, he curls up in the chair opposite, yawning. He usually sleeps twelve hours a night and takes naps in the afternoon, anchored to a respirator in the kitchen by a ten-metre-long plastic tube — “my leash,” as he calls it.
At seventeen, St-Pierre was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a progressive disease that affects mucus-producing glands, particularly the lungs, leaving them prone to infection. There is no cure (the illness worsens with age and cuts life expectancy in half), so at thirty-one he was pushing himself to the limit. He had always been careful with his health, just as a dancer monitors a recurring injury, but his body was starting to strain. “We saw the changes happen quickly,” Boucher remembers. “He was very tired and couldn’t dance. He needed to take oxygen.” In February 2006, St-Pierre performed La porno, knowing “it was the last time. I struggled to finish the piece.” Instead of dancing in La tendresse, then a work-in-progress, he fully committed himself to directing it.
The transition is apparent in the work: a narrative arc replaces the loose series of sketches that preceded it. St-Pierre, who studied literature and cinema in CEGEP, suggests that the structure of the piece benefited from his outsider’s perspective. The frenzied opening sequence recalls the heady tempo of Carmina Burana, for example, and the performers’ fluttering hands and ready smiles are a tip of the top hat to his childhood idol, Fred Astaire. Now St-Pierre is taking the idea of a big show and putting it into practice.
The conclusion of the Sociologie trilogy, Over Our Dead Bodies, will feature a cast of sixty, many of whom have no formal training. Some are friends of company members, while others asked St-Pierre if they could take part in his next production. In September 2007, the group came together for the first time. Standing outside to greet them one by one, St-Pierre saw the crowd as a whole only upon entering the studio. The impact was immediate. “I’d never seen anything like it. I had a little moment of panic,” he recalls. After the first session, he fell asleep, exhausted by the effort. But he has become adept at directing. His body remains a tightly wound knot that pulses with little shocks of intuition. “If I get shivers, I know it’s good,” he says, referring to the creative process. He stays vast, working on big themes in small groups, and guides improvisations with simple instructions, sometimes just a few words. Finding a space large enough to accommodate the group, as well as orchestrating sixty different schedules, has been challenging. In the past year, he has only held three rehearsals, and the piece won’t be ready until 2010. In the meantime, he is working on its prelude, a solo entitled Over My Dead Body.
Creating a work that breaks away from the collective was a natural choice for St-Pierre. He is a solitary person, and happily stays at home with the phone unplugged for weeks at a time. After an almost three-year absence, the solo will mark his return to the stage. He had been planning it before he stopped dancing, but kept putting it off until now. The Tangente theatre in Montreal has booked the piece for January, with the understanding that St-Pierre may not be the one performing. He is forging ahead all the same, speaking in affirmative terms of “when” rather than “if.” He says, “The final piece is about the moment when you’re ready to fight again, for lasting relationships, for social justice.” According to Robidoux, one of the possible understudies for Dead Body, “You can see it well in the new creation: he’s very animated and alive and vigorous.”
The solo is an affirmation of the body, and St-Pierre admits that his condition is a driving force behind the work. True to form, he is using the solo to provoke and pervert, writing in the program notes of Dead Body, “Between being born and dying, I masturbate, I come, I clean it up, and, when I have time, try to de-dramatize my existence.” However matter-of-fact his mission statement, St-Pierre cannot resist conjuring the image of the martyr for the final act. Regarding his own spirituality, he says, “I believe in one person: myself.” In many ways, the trilogy mirrors his own trajectory, from destruction to rehabilitation to reinvention. The end is a new beginning.
