Counter Offence Returns With Renewed Relevance (Teesri Duniya Theatre)

Oliver Price and Sophie-Thérèse Stone-Richards of the play Counter Offence. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Melnyk

It’s something rare and special to see an original work of theatre remounted in a new era. Counter Offence originally premiered here in Montreal in the 1990s, written by Rahul Varma and directed by Jack Langedijk, and produced by a then-new Teesri Duniya Theatre, and its comeback in 2023 is timely.

The play follows the form of a police procedural, but deviates in refusing to privilege the police’s perspective in its unfurling of a murder mystery. A young Iranian man, Shapoor (played by Arash Ebrahimi), assaults his wife Shazia (Amanda Silveira), and his progress in obtaining Canadian citizenship is jeopardized by the legal process that Shazia is advised to take in order to be safely separated from him. Advising Shazia in her journey is social worker Clarinda (played by Sophie-Thérèse Stone-Richards), with much-involved pressure from her parents (played by Ambica Sharma & AJ Richardson). Adding to the rising pressure cooking in this piece is a passionate police officer, Galliard (Oliver Price)—lauded cautiously by the social worker for his ferocious work in the domestic violence department—and his supervising officer (Howard Rosenstein). Into this fray saunters the charismatic lawyer Moolchand (Aladeen Tawfeek), who tries to mine positive police reform (and a great career move) by representing Shapoor, insisting that the police force’s history of systemic racism was used against him.

Ambica Sharma and Andrew Joseph Richardson of the play Counter Offence. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Melnyk

For a story so caught up in “the system” and its flaws, “the law” and its slipperiness, and the State of Quebec and its shortcomings, Counter Offense has a glowing heart radiating out from its stage. Set designer Marie-Eve Fortier puts the audience in a jury’s box on either side of an alley staging while maintaining the warm familial homestead of Mr. & Mrs. Begum where they try (and fail) to keep Shazia safe from Shapoor. Across from this hearth is the promise of safety in Clarinda’s office, similarly carpeted and cozy. Then, there are the desks of the police and legal representatives, where the flags of Quebec and Canada do the subtle stating of the power that calls itself justice. 

Testimonies from every character in this ensemble run throughout the story as it jumps back and forth in time, and director Murdoch Schon gives their cast the beautiful opportunity to engage with each other’s bodies in expressive, dancerly movements. Throughout the play, limbs encircle the characters and their body weight is gently buffeted with and without narrative relationships. This artistic flourish broke the mold of the murder mystery into a more theatrical representation of the disparate power of testimony: from police, from lawyers compared to that of immigrants, and from women. These movement interludes were not always necessary, but they were consistent, impressive, and interesting.

Counter Offense seems in many ways like the perfect comeback show for Teesri Duniya Theatre. The theatre company co-produced the immersive, site-specific piece Meet Me that took audiences all over McGill’s campus with a cast of three, but it is so refreshing—and increasingly unlikely—to see a cast of eight on stage as we did at the Segal Centre. The number of actors manages to smooth out the notable difference in the strength of performance. Principle plot lines let inter-generational conflict play out, and this is where weaker characterization and performance manage not to hamstring the show as a whole, being balanced so well by the veteran actors graciously anchoring the story’s rhythm and pacing if younger ones fall out of sync. Counter Offense was a crackling finisher for the Teesri Duniya Theatre 2022-23 season. They have yet to announce their next production, but are currently hosting the second cycle of their Global Dialogues series.

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Teesri Duniya Theatre

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Vero Denis is a writer based in Montreal.

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She's Late // A Circus Show - Witnessing the World of Double Fantasy

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She's Late // A Circus Show by Double Fantasy is an experimental circus performance that blends dance and performance art to create a surreal and immersive experience. The show comprises two acts: an improvisation portion and the main dance performance.

During the improvisation portion, the performers explore different characters, outfits, and scenic devices while manipulating objects and exploring the theme of gravity. One character emerges from a giant, fuzzy egg shape with water sacks, while another plays with a hanging contraption of balloons. The performers manipulate different pieces around the stage, even sawing some of them open. The lighting and stage setting are equally impressive, with bold choices of color and a sense of randomness that added to the surreal atmosphere. The audience is treated to a unique experience of absurdity and visual spectacle, culminating in a captivating dance performance in the second act.

The stage setting and colors of the performance also caught my attention. The use of bold colors and random objects, such as the giant balloons and water sacks, added to the overall surreal and dreamlike atmosphere. The lighting was set beautifully, with different colors and intensities used to complement each scene. The combination of the stage design and lighting created a visually stunning experience that enhanced the overall impact of the performance.

Image by Document original

The main performance is a mesmerizing dance piece that sees the performers balance giant balloons over a fan, bounce water balloons up and down on a pulley, and use harnesses to move across the stage. The water balloon scene is particularly awe-inspiring, as the performers bounce the balloons up and down in a perfectly synchronized manner. The performers show incredible physical strength and coordination, seamlessly combining dance and circus performance. One performer even rises up on a harness upstage while another is naked on top of giant balloons.

She's Late // A Circus Show is a unique and thought-provoking performance that explores themes of impossibility, surprise, and tension. The performers share a complicity with the place, the objects, the scenography, and the public, creating a shared experience that blurs the boundaries between performance and reality. Nien Tzu Weng and Camille Lacelle-Wilsey are "soft clowns" who use their illogical gestures and misunderstandings to create an amusing and welcoming atmosphere, despite the surreal and absurd actions taking place on stage.

The artists’ unique perspectives and styles left a lasting impression on me, and I can't wait to see what they create next. For anyone who missed this show, I highly recommend following these artists to keep up with their future endeavors. It's clear that they have a lot to offer, and I'm excited to see where they go from here.

Image by Document original

Double Fantasy is comprised of two artists, Nien Tzu Weng & Camille Lacelle-Wilsey:

Nien Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist and lighting designer based in Tio'tia:ke-Montreal. She aims to build bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary performance, and a laboratory based approach to lighting design. As both choreographer and lighting designer, Weng is curious about the relationship between movement and new media practices, and plays with the balance between reality and fantasy. She uses light and multimedia in order to play with perspective, perceiving performance as a process of transmitting dialogues between inner and outer space, where presence and image builds multiple, overlapping conceptions of time. Her projects have been shared in Node Digital Festival (Frankfurt, DE), Biennale Némo (Paris, FR), Ars Electronica (Linz, AUT), Les Percéides (Percé, QC), SummerWorks (Toronto, ON), 1-act SHIFT Theatre (Vancouver, BC) as well as OFFTA Festival, Elektra, Akousma, Tangente Danse, La Chapelle, and MAI Theatre in Montreal. She co-created the collective: Double Fantasy and is currently a member of LePARC (Milieux), one of the supported emerging artists with CCOV, as well as a resident artist at Topological Media Lab, where she develops her research on presence and interactivity. 

Camille Lacelle-Wilsey is a contemporary dance artist originally from Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and newly based in the Eastern Townships. After graduating from Concordia University with a BFA in contemporary dance, she continued her choreographic research, focusing on interference, transformation and sudden change of state. Since 2015, she has presented her creations Come a Bit Closer, Ghostbox, Dispositif and D'amour ils se gaveront, de haine ils déborderont at Tangente. She is currently in creation for the She's late - A Circus Show with her sidekick Nien Tzu Weng with whom she created the Double Fantasy collective. She has just presented a solo performance exhibition entitled Radiant  Investigation combining photography and dance at the VAV Gallery. In parallel to creation, she is interested in the creative process as a videographer, rehearsal director, member of a selection jury, movement consultant and performer-researcher. She has worked with artists such as Sara Hanley, Louis Clément Da Costa, Émile Pineault, Erin Hill, Nien Tzu Weng, Eryn Tempest and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus.

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She’s Late // A Circus Show ran March 15, 17 & 18 at La Chapelle Theatre.

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Performers + Creators Collectif Double Fantasy

Special guests Lael Stellick + Erin Hill

Costum Designer Marie-Audrey Jacques

Sound Designer Dae Courtney

Light Designer Jon Cleveland

Set Design Étienne Plante

Technical Director Darah Miah

Production Support François Bouvier Michael Martini

Artistic Coach  Sylvie Tourangeau

Supported by Danse-Cité + Conseil des Arts du Canada + Conseil des Arts de Montréal + RURART - art contemporain en milieu rural + CASJB - Centre des arts de la scène Jean-Besré + LA SERRE - arts vivants + Ranch Cheval de Soie + LOL Festival.

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She’s Late // A Circus Show

Double Fantasy

Info | Nien Tzu Weng | Camille Lacelle-Wilsey

Holly Hilts is a Core Member of Also Cool. She is a jeweler, coder & theatre worker currently based in Montreal.

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Proje(c)t; Les Bonnes - Language & power dynamics through an adaptation of Jean Genet's 'The Maids'

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Image by Phanie Ethier

This weekend, we’re especially excited to catch the play Proje(c)t; Les Bonnes, running at Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival from January 26th-29th. 

Proje(c)t; Les Bonnes is an adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids, presented in a format crossing time and language and praised for its “diabolical weirdness”. The play is performed in French, English, and Spanish, with English subtitles provided.

Roxane Loumède, the play’s director and adaptor, describes the show as, “strange, sexy and excitingly terrifying. It can make you uncomfortable, but that’s the point.”

The play revolves around two women, Solange and Claire, who work for a wealthy Westmount woman referred to as Madame. While she is out, they spend their evenings enacting different plots to murder Madame, until this ritual backfires. Loumède jokingly notes, “you’ll have to come and see the show to find out what happens next.”

Last week, we had the lovely opportunity to meet Loumède and discuss how this play came to be, and what incited the different elements of her adaptation, like language politics, power dynamics, and wealth.

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On bilingualism in theatre practice 

Roxane Loumède: It all started when I finished at Concordia in 2015. I graduated from an English school, but I was a Francophone. I was not really in the English or French communities, just in a weird in-between, so I wanted to start creating my own work.

I decided to start workshopping and thinking about bilingual theatre, where using French and English would serve the narrative and the dramaturgy of the piece. That way, I could bridge the gap and hire people that I wanted to work with from both the English and French communities. 

I worked on Jean Genet’s The Maids at Concordia as a performer. I thought about what it means to bring a piece from the 1940s to the stage, and how to do so, whether or not the play is outdated. It’s a story that talks about how these two maids are serving this really wealthy woman. When it was written in the 1940s, Montreal was in a place where the Anglophones had more money than Francophones. So I thought, if I put this in the original time period, then the Madame would be an Anglophone, and the two maids would be Francophones. 

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Image by Phanie Ethier

On starting the process and adapting the text

RL: When I got some money and a team together in 2018, I started workshopping the piece and rewriting the text in French and English, and also rewriting from French from France to French from Quebec, which is different. I used more of an older “Canadian English” for the Madame.

I asked myself, “Today in Montreal, who is more wealthy, who still has maids working for them?” And it’s not the same as in the 1940s. Now, Francophone people in Montreal have as much wealth as Anglophones. If you go into affluent homes in Outremont, or Westmount, you will find Francophone homeowners with South American domestic workers. So, thinking about that—and talking about it with the crew—I added a third language, Spanish, to the piece. This allows the play to reflect the reality of today. 

One of the cast members, Camila, who has been with the project since the beginning, speaks Spanish fluently. So, it was with her that we started thinking about the idea that her character would switch from French to Spanish. We aimed to show a shift in history by indicating who is dominating, and who works for who and examining the power dynamics… While also shedding light on how the circumstances of the women working in these homes haven’t changed much since the 1940s.

In this way, the piece by Jean Genet is still really relevant today because the issues are still present—not just in Montreal. Boundaries are more or less broken most of the time because you develop a close relationship with the person you are working for, and vice versa.

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Image by Phanie Ethier

On learning through Proje(c)t; les Bonnes development

RL: The Les Bonnes of 2018 and the one I’m presenting in now in 2023 is a big representation of the artist I have become. It’s really nice to work with artists who are willing to try your nonsense ideas and let you fail at them… When you say, “Sorry that was not the right choice!” they’re flexible. Being able to learn what works and doesn’t work with a team you trust makes you a better director, in my opinion.

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Image by Phanie Ethier

On the viewing experience

RL: I’ve built this show so that you can understand what is going on without having to grasp all the multilingual dialog perfectly. We’ve worked a lot with movement, sound and lighting so all of your senses are very much activated. This helps bring the actors’ stage business and onstage dynamics to the forefront, highlighting the characters’ struggles. 

If you’re not fully immersed in the words, you will still have a pleasant experience and get something from it. If you don’t want to spend the whole show reading the English subtitles, you can let yourself go and be fully in the action and get swept away.

Loumède’s other piece Ensaf attend was presented as a reading last summer as part of Jamais lu Festival. She has more projects in the works and you can watch this space to stay tuned!

image by Phanie Ethier

Proje(c)t; Les Bonnes runs from tomorrow, January 26th, until Sunday, January 29th at Centaur Theatre.

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Adaptation and Direction: Roxane Loumède

Performers: Marie-Ève Bérubé, Camila Forteza, Alexandra Petrachuck

Assistant Dramaturg: Geneviève Gagné

Costumes: Sophie El-Assaad

Set & Props: Bruno-Pierre Houle

Lights: Catherine Fournier-Poirier

Sound Design: Joseph Browne

Video & Technical Director: Vladimir Alexandru Cara

Assistant Director & Stage Manager: Trevor Barrette

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Proje(c)t; Les Bonnes

3e Espace Théâtre

Tickets | Info | Troisième espace théâtre

Holly Hilts is a Core Member of Also Cool. She is a jeweller, coder & theatre worker currently based in Montreal.

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Dance Spotlight: BLEU NÉON

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Kim-Sanh Châu is mesmerizing in her piece, BLEU NÉON. Between dance, movement and Vietnamese rap is a journey to the rediscovery of an imaginary homeland.

In a short series of sold-out relaxed performances* at Montreal, arts interculturels (MAI), Châu moves methodically through variations of squatting, glowing in a magnificent, multicoloured haze of neon light, designed by Jon Cleveland. The room is set up in thrust (audience on three sides), with chairs and cushions on the ground. Cables are loosely hanging around the back wall, coiled along the edges with neon lights piled on all sides.

Photo by Kinga Michalska

As we waited for the performance to start, we read translation booklets for the performance’s texts in in Vietnamese, English, and French. There were colouring pages, snacks and prior to the performance, we were told exactly how the show would unfold and that our seating could be adjusted without a problem if we were not comfortable.

With Châu , we discussed how nostalgia acted as a coping mechanism for Vietnamese refugees in the 80s; helping them to imagine a world and home that no longer existed for them. The Vietnam that Châu knows well is so vibrant, bustling, and youthful. This performance integrated the music and movement of these different eras, these varying nostalgias, the loss of language, and difficulties surrounding sexual objectification along the way.

Though Châu does not speak Vietnamese, she learned each rap for this performance phonetically. In the talk-back after the show, she explained how Toronto rapper JONAIR wrote the pieces in Vietnamese, elaborating on the distance children of diasporas have from their cultures.

Châu’s collaborator Chi, of Hazy Montagne Mystique / Chittakone Baccam, grew up in Laos, right next to Vietnam and was able to access these points of nostalgia through his grandparents’ audio tapes. Together, Châu and Chi create a dreamy and dark soundscape of ambient music, modern rap beats and cassette tapes from another time.

Photo by Kinga Michalska

Creator and performer Kim-Sanh Châu is a Montreal-based Vietnamese-French contemporary dance artist. She has lived in Montreal for over 15 years and has a parallel life in Vietnam, with a dance studio, community, lovers and mentors. Her practice comprises choreographic installation and video-making. Châu is interested in the emergence of imaginary landscapes through the body, distilled from far away dreams, imaginary memories and psychotropic reminiscences.

It was an absolute pleasure to watch this performance in a tiny space. With an audience all around, facing each other, we took a dive into her magical world.

This show will be back in Montreal for Vietnamese Culture Week in September and will also be performed in Vietnam later this year.

The BLEU NÉON soundtrack is provided by Montreal's Hazy Montagne Mystique / Chittakone Baccam (composition), JONAIR, Duy Quang Vu (paroles rap), and Vietnamese experimental trio Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective

*All BLEU NÉON performances have a more relaxed attitude to noise and movement within the theatre. The reception, soundscape and visual atmosphere are adapted to create a calm and inclusive environment for all.

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Theatre Spotlight: Black Theatre Workshop's "Pipeline" Design Team

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Black Theatre Workshop is making big moves — their bilingual production of Pipeline, co-produced with La Manufacture, has swung us right back into gear with this emotional, challenging piece and beautiful, bold creative choices.

The play follows Nya, a single mother who teaches in a public school and her teenage son Omari, who attends a private institution. As Omari struggles with the everyday factors working against him in the school system, an incident occurs that puts his future, and the education his mother worked so hard for him to have access to, at risk.

Pipeline’s stellar design team deserves to have a light shone upon them while audiences still have a chance to catch the French version of the production from April 26th to May 8th at Théâtre La Licorne.

On set and costumes, Nalo Soyini Bruce thought a lot about the uniforms we wear everyday: in school, for work and as members of society. A theme throughout Nalo’s work is her non-traditional mix of pieces to create asymmetry in her characters. In Pipeline, the architecture and shapes throughout costume and set created the perfect industrial, chilling rigidity that characters manipulated with their frustrations.

It is important to highlight Nalo’s stellar team of Black women supporting her design: Courtney Moses (Set & Costume Assistant), Mlle Geri (Make-Up Assistant), & Enyse Charles (Costume Assistant). Nalo has expressed that their work was instrumental to the process and collaborating exclusively with a team of Black women in costume, makeup and sets was a first for her. She feels it is important for youth to see this example and be inspired to enter creative fields as performing artists as well as designers.

Elena Stoodley, Sound Designer, felt personally connected to the story of Pipeline, having grown up in the Quebec school system. “Like Omari, I was sometimes targeted and with no other ways to protect myself, I used to result to my fists to stop the verbal bullying,” she says. She even wrote a piece about her constant fear of ending up in prison because the school system at an early age made her feel like she needed to be contained.

In creating the production’s sound design, Elena thought about how prison systems are mirrored in other institutions and “how weirdly, a prison soundscape resembles high school hallways. The cafeteria, the intercom, the bus that gets you to class or your cell, how time is counted...” She mentions the threat of being just a number is latent, a theme echoed in the video and costume designs, as well.

Lighting Designer Tim Rodrigues, a staple of the Montreal theatre community, knew he would be working on this production as of 2019. Rodrigues was drawn to the emotional layers in the script, as well as the importance of the issue at the centre of the story: the school-to-prison pipeline.

Starting with identifying moments where light or quality of light is mentioned in the script, Tim also follows and elevates the emotional journeys of the characters with lighting. He looks into different cultural references mentioned in the script (poetry, music, etc.) and carries his impressions of the story and the world into design meetings and conversations with the creative team and directors. Tim’s lighting for Pipeline created a moody, chilling colour palette that elevated the intensity and depth of the content presented.

Video design team Andrew & Emily, of potatoCakes_digital, were also enthused to be a part of this production and developed their design virtually using Unreal Engine and a draft of Nalo’s design to pre-visualize their mapping. The video design mapped throughout the show onto the actors and stage, providing context, shape, and texture; elevating the emotional peaks of the performance.

To find out more, go check out the show at La Licorne from April 26th to May 8th! Tickets are available here.

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Artist Spotlight: Sophie El Assaad

Hello, and welcome to a small walk-through of the world of Sophie El Assaad.

Sophie is an award-winning designer, director, and theatre-maker, and she cannot help but ooze her lovely sweet creative aura. I would describe her energy as a light fluffy mist that may crack with a low rumble or quick flash of lightning. 

With her company, Theatre Nuaj, she has developed the project Black Balloon in many iterations: live outdoors in Centaur Theatre’s Portico Project late 2020, as Leila, a short film presented at Centaur Theatre’s 2021 Wildside Festival, and through multiple residencies.

This interview was held over two sessions with the intent to give a non-linear progression and experience of Sophie’s thoughts and world through visuals, direct quotes, as well as some snippets of her work or inspiration.

Sophie has curated a playlist here, that I would encourage you to listen to as you read through.

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Segment from experimental video ( Sophie El Assaad, circa 2014)

I thought about this word yesterday.
[ Underbelly ]

Maybe I should have used it when describing themes I like to work with artistically; the hidden violent side that exists in people.

“For my birthday, my dad got me a cake, my mum got me a cake, and my sister got me a cake. It was perfect.”

On working in residency on Black Balloon:

In the past, I approached work via building a very solid core and working my way out of it, but what my last creation residency has done (working with dancers and movement actors) was it allowed me to be use impulse and intuition, working from the outside in, and discovering what that means afterward — the whole process of trusting the work and the process has been super interesting — very scary and always kept me on my toes, but, in the end, amounted to something reliant on body and emotions rather than intellectuality.

I really like involving artists that don’t necessarily specialize in the medium, who can contribute to the piece in unexpected ways and teach me. I just love surprises. The actor who played Leila (Maria Marsli) was not an actor before we worked together, for example.

Segment from Sophie El Assaad’s video Leila, shown at the Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival in 2021 ( This process is made possible by the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada Council for the Arts)

Sometimes in film, I think that theatricality is lost because you have the liberty to take many takes to get it exactly how you want and perfect it. Filming a mistake rather than having to start again could be a form of theatricality in video that I am interested in exploring. Those moments really drive me - those moments of live, unpredictable human behaviour, mistakes.

I really love paying attention to the little details that happen in the in between space — the micro moments before going into action. Observing that – it’s so beautiful when you can see it and take the time to watch the brain processing and how it translates through the body.

It’s been amazing to shift my process upside down and give more control to other artists involved in my process- it’s liberating and collaborative! It leaves a lot of room for surprise and the unpredictable.

The photo was taken by Sophie El Assaad of Chadia Kikondjo for the project Black Balloon: Portico Project. 2020

An important image for Black Balloon was the moon. There’s a theory that the moon was created by a collision that happened between the earth and another planet and all the debris that was created from the collision that was floating around the orbit of the earth came together through gravity to form the moon. So it was through destruction that this essential part of our world was created.

“I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person to memorize poetry and say it to someone in the right moment.”

On decolonizing work and family history:

I am trying to decolonize my work by doing a lot more research into my own culture and bringing that into the process. I’m Lebanese, and I grew up in Bahrain, but I find I am very Western in how I was brought up; my mum is British, and I went to Western schools. So everything I learned in terms of history and art is from a Western perspective. So I’m going through this process right now — it’s kind of like an identity crisis or rebirth — of rediscovering my father, his culture and baggage, through my art. In a way, it feels like the longer I am physically away from my Middle Eastern roots, the more I try to get closer to it through my work. There is an invisible thread tying me to the sea, the sounds of street cats and the call to prayers, the salt in the air, the sand and the rocky desert. It’s like a past life that I constantly mourn. Even though I love my current life and probably wouldn’t move back, there is a certain void.

Image of my paternal ancestors. My grandmother is the young girl between the man and woman.

My dad shows his love through cooking. Every Sunday, my dad cooks and my sister and I go and spend time with the family (as much as we can). He actively plans his weekend around what he is going to cook for us. It’s a great way to bring me back to my past living in Bahrain, or summers spent in Beirut with family, because he mostly cooks Lebanese food (even though my mum’s British palette doesn’t always leap for joy at it). He’s a very silent man and there's a lot about him that I find very mysterious. Sometimes it’s hard to connect. That’s kind of why I feel driven to researching and creating through my ancestral culture. It’s also a way for me to connect with and rediscover my dad.

Image of a broken mirror (photo by Sophie El Assaad)

Something that has been inspiring me lately are the traces of life that you can find in dead material. I am obsessed! An example would be a shattered mirror – it holds the traces of the action in its appearance. It has so much energy locked into its absolute stillness.

Flayed Man Holding a Dagger and His Skin, From Juan Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano, 1560

Some of my favourite ways of working costumes are when I can put a lot of energy or emotion into a fabric – new fabric (especially when it is machine made) is “dead”, but the more you manipulate it, the more it absorbs your energy and holds traces of that love or hate – like human skin. You can often tell the kind of life a person has had from their skin and it’s the same with material. If you give love to material, you can see it. And I try to put that into consideration as much as possible when I’m thinking of design and how I treat my materials. They’ll share their life story with anyone who’ll pay attention, using their own unique language.

I love the body. That’s why I love theatre, performance and dance. There is something I am really drawn to in certain art – it’s this primal connection that, as humans, we tend to neglect or actively conceal in our daily lives. I love to see the body do things that I don’t get to see in my daily life because it’s a part of my being that I don’t really get to explore. Witnessing our primal side, or the animal within us, is cathartic for me. There is a violence inside all of us that I think is dormant but easily awoken. We see it in times of war, or political hysteria.

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“There is a secret part of me that I would really love to have more opportunity to explore – my clown.”

When I say clown, I mean a weird creepy out of control thing. I have this clown that I only present to some people. I don’t know what their name is yet, but she’s a troll. She comes out sometimes when I am in a special mood.

Self-portrait of one of my inner trolls. 2022

When I get into my clown, it just happens naturally and not very often – it’s funny, talking about it makes it sound as though it’s a real thing that is developed, but I have only recently discovered her. She comes out when I say something mean or that I consider unreasonable (or when I get exaggeratedly emotional/passionate) – “ah there she is! The troll is out”. It’s my way of coping with my inner animal.

I don’t know if stories belong to anybody – it’s not necessarily about where a person is from or what they have personally experienced, but how a story is told. I definitely think that if someone wants to talk about an experience or an identity that isn’t theirs, they need to make sure they work with people who have that experience or identity, to make sure the story is developed in an informed way. It is important to have that authentic perspective.

I think artists need to be accountable for how they represent people, especially if those people are marginalised in society and already have that weight to carry. There is an ethical question to ask about whether you are profiting from a situation that misrepresents others. I think there is great responsibility that comes with the privilege of being an artist who is given a public platform.

Unfinished painting of a horse by Sophie El Assaad

Image from a workshop of a creation piece by Sophie El Assaad ,2022. Lighting designed by Zoe Roux and modeled by Nasim Lootij.

Image from Sophie El Assaad’s video Leila, shown at the Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival in 2021 (Chadia Kikondjo as Mother Moon; This process is made possible by the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada Council for the Arts)

On process:

I saw a lot of my early work as internships – there wouldn’t be a lot of budget or pay, but what I did get was experience and a platform, so I saw those as my opportunities to go all out and take risks (I also chose projects that really inspired me, so it fueled me in other ways than just financial). For me, the extra time put into the work was worth it. I don’t know if it’s what I would recommend to others, but it’s what I did to get my career started.

Costumes designed by Sophie El Assaad for the show Jonathan Livingston: A Seagull Parable, (Surreal SoReal/ Geordie Theatre, photo by Marie Andrée Lemire)

“If I have an idea I think, ‘Can I do it? Maybe not, but why not try and see what happens?’”

Mask created by Sophie El Assaad for the band Fleece for album Stunning and Atrocious in 2021. Photograph by Cameron Mitchell, Styling by Kayleigh Choiniere, Clothes by Lucas Stowe and modeled by Owen.

“I would also love to make a play about pigeons. Write a play, or ask someone to write a play and just have giant pigeons having a conversation.”

My pigeon friends Pin Pin and Smithy (the ones that live on my building, that I feed) – they’ve started this repetitive occurrence. Every morning they have a choir session. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard pigeons but they gather so close to my windows and it’s a cacophony of chirps and bubbles. It is so beautiful.

I have a fascination with birds. I love seeing little sparrows in the winter when they’re in the bushes — because they look like leaves but then they move around — so it becomes a sort of like, magical and alive bush.

I think recording rehearsals can be useful in my future projects – seeing how accidents can become pieces in themselves. But I also see it as a way of approaching the process. For example, what would happen if you filmed something, like a small gesture, edited it on video to slow down or twitch it, then brought it back into rehearsal. Being influenced by the technology and what that offers and finding how it can bring meaning is something I want to experiment with. I think it could bring unexpected approaches to movement and performance. Video is like a second pair of eyes, noticing the little details you can’t capture during a rehearsal. 

“There is something about the early rehearsal process, the magic that comes during improv. Because it’s live and in the moment — it’s so raw and unrehearsed, completely reliant on intuition — it’s truly magic.”

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Sophie El Assaad

Holly Hilts is a core member of Also Cool. She is a maker of things: theatre sets, jewelry and websites, currently based in Montreal.

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