Resonance

A Portal for Research-Creation

This portal allows you to have a glimpse into various recent or ongoing research-creation (or research on creation) projects by Louis Patrick Leroux and artistic and academic collaborators. These projects originate from the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology at Concordia University and, in many cases, as part of an ongoing artistic residence with Matralab.

Projects

Each of the four linked web pages hosts its particular project's intellectual, artistic, and pedagogical aims and seeks to chart its creative process. The featured projects include Dialogues fantasques pour causeurs éperdus, the FQRSC-funded three year/three production Hypertext and Performance: A Resonant Response to Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft, the burgeoning Shakespeare and Story: Cymbeline Materials project affiliated with the McGill Shakespeare Group, and the collaborative Montreal Working Group on Circus, affiliated with the National Circus School of Montreal and Concordia University, which serves as a focal point for research on Québec circus.

Subscribe to the Resonance Newsletter

Hamlet on the Wire

As part of a three-year project (2015-2018) on circus dramaturgy supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture, Hamlet on the Wire is a research-creation performance sonic environment installation. Created in June, upon the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this performance explores the possible tensions and dialogue between the voice of Hamlet, modulated and manipulated by a tight wire artist, and the movement of the body and the mind in search of a way out. This project is part of focussed exploration workshops researching circus dramaturgy.

Montreal Working Group
on Cirque / Circus

The Montreal Working Group on Circus brings together university researchers from various fields, as well as circus pedagogues and practitioners working establishing a multidirectional flow of research knowledge. We are focused on knowledge retention in circus arts training, dissemination of circus-related knowledge, and in widening the scope and encouraging dynamic academic approaches to studying the circus arts.

Witchcraft

“Hypertext and Performance: A Resonant Response to Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft” was a three-year FQRSC-funded interdisciplinary theatre project engaging English literature scholars and contemporary theatre research-creation practitioners in studying, performing, and teaching Joanna Baillie’s gothic play, Witchcraft in today’s hypermedia environment. The website charts the intellectual and creative engagement with the original play and illustrates the creative process over the various workshops and productions.

Milford Haven — Cymbeline Materials

The “Cymbeline Materials” project seeks to explore various performative possibilities, including video installation and postdramatic play with narrative materials. This research-creation project is complementary to the McGill Shakespeare Group’s current “Shakespeare and Story” research program which develops a new account of the artistic, social, intellectual, and historical dimensions of Shakespearean narrative. In light of the narrativity of the human life-world, the “Play of Story” research program asks, to what degree is Shakespeare’s historical durability and cultural mobility an effect of his genius as a creator of memorable stories?

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Dialogues fantasques
pour causeurs éperdus

Dialogues fantasques pour causeurs éperdus est une série de treize piécettes et textes divers d’une durée de 2 à 20 minutes chacun qui mettent en scène un homme et une femme interdépendants, mais néanmoins incapables de vivre l’un avec l’autre. On découvrira que cet homme est l’auteur des piécettes et que la femme fait figure de muse bien traditionnelle. Les Dialogues ont fait l’objet de diverses productions au cours des années, mais ils ont été rassemblés et créés ensemble dans le cadre d’une résidence d’artiste à Matralab en 2008. Un dernier dialogue est créé en mai 2012, quelques mois avant la publication de l’ensemble chez Prise de parole.

Why Resonance?

For its responsiveness and for its deep-rooted echo of an original impulse. These projects engage in a resonant response to imperfect and sometimes frustrating source works, allowing for a fundamental reading of the work, a dialogue with it — if only to play up misreadings, playful appropriations, and deconstructions.

Creation is an act of reading and opportune misreading. No work of art is truly original; it is always tributary to an earlier sequence of earlier works. As a playwright, director, artist, and very much as a teacher of literature and of creative writing, I’m especially interested in engaging in a series of resonant responses to source texts — exploring intertextuality, intratextuality, citation, pastiche, emulation, deconstruction. If theatre is, indeed, a dialogue with the dead as Antoine Vitez and Tadeusz Kantor would both have it, the dialogue I am drawn to spans many lives and many more deaths to be replicated in as many variations as can be explored, from straight theatre to circus, through installation and performance.

About Louis Patrick Leroux

Dr. Louis Patrick Leroux is an associate professor in both the Department of English and Département d’études françaises at Concordia University in Montreal.

Read the biography

Contact

patrick.leroux[@]concordia.ca

Subscribe to our newsletter