Infinitheatre 1999-2020

On the right here is what I call the “it” riff from Kerouac’s “On the Road”. It nails the inspiration of being “in the moment”, that sublime state of creativity we strive for as artists. The “it” riff is one of the reasons I named the new theatre, infinithéâtre.

I believe fundamentally that theatre has the potential to be a unique symbiosis of entertainment and social and political discourse. The most exciting theatre of the past, the Greeks, Brecht, Shakespeare, has always been a reflection of and engagement with its own community. This creates the potential to generate a genuine electricity between stage and the human beings watching/listening. Hence, from the beginning, Infinithéâtre stressed the need to develop, produce and broker our Québec English-language playwrights because we were creating for a Québec community.

Here is the Mandate we developed for Infinithéâtre.

Infinite Journey

MANDATE
REFLECTING AND EXPLORING LIFE IN 21ST CENTURY QUÉBEC

Infinithéâtre believes fundamentally theatre should reflect the challenges, diversity and possibilities of its own community. Infinithéâtre works to achieve an engaged, dynamic connection between stage and audience by seeking out, developing, showcasing and brokering original plays by Québec and Indigenous playwrights.

Infinithéâtre searches for innovative Québec and Indigenous plays, playwrights and new theatrical styles through our Write-On-Q! playwriting competition, our Pipeline public reading series and our Playwrights’ Unit script development programs, all open to the broadest spectrum of Québec writers. We strive to share the plays discovered and developed by these dramaturgical programs with other theatres in Québec and beyond.

Infinithéâtre celebrates live human communication in order to counter the wired universe dominating the mindset and quality of contemporary life. We invest energy and resources transforming ‘found’ spaces into performance venues because we believe experiencing theatre in new and unusual places heightens the live theatre experience for our audience.

With its Action Infini program Infinithéâtre also works to engage a younger generation of theatregoers in live theatre.

As life in the great creative crucible of Montréal is primarily in French, language, and the paradox of creating in English in Québec, a linguistic minority within a linguistic minority, fuels our creative exploration and gives us a sense of belonging.

Infinithéâtre, un théâtre fièrement Québécois contemporain et provoquant – qui explore et reflet l’infini de notre existence humaine, -exploring and reflecting the infinite of our human existence, - in English.

"Anglo" Devoir Article

Les Anglos Enchainées

Infinithéâtre Promo 2014

A 2014 promo for the theatre edited by a member of our Board of Directors. A bit lugubrious, but it does capture some of the work we did in the Bain Saint-Michel. Scrolling at the end of the video is a list of all the productions and plays we had developed and/or staged up to 2014. For a theatre with our limited resources, the amount of theatre we created is extraordinary. The officers at the Conseil des arts du Québec and the Conseil des Arts de Montréal started complaining we were doing too much with our small grants. Infini was showing up comparable French-language theatres whose grants were double or triple our grants and yet they were only producing a fraction of the amount of work we were.

Running a theatre involves a lot of writing applications and reports to government funding agencies. After kissing corporate asses to raise money, this aspect of the job was my least favourite, “Zeit Verschwendung.” (time squandering) As the grant deadlines approached every year, we lived in, what I called, “The days of fiction.” Here is the 2005-2006 year-end report as a sample what had to be sent every year to CALQ, Canada Council for the Arts and CAM.

(View Link)

Productions