Katia Makdissi-Warren, design and composition
Marie-Annick Beliveau, design, libretto and artistic direction
Charlie Poirier-Bouthillette, video
Normal Studio, immersive realization
Flavie Lemée, lighting
Marianne Lonergan, set design and costumes
Angélique Wilkie, dramaturgy
MUSICIANS
Marie-Annick Béliveau, mezzo-soprano
Marie-Hélène Breault, flutes
Aymen Trabulsi, nay
Pamela Reimer, piano
Bertil Schulrabe, percussion
Michel Duval, David Cronkite, and Clayton Kennedy, basses
November 9 to 11, 2024
Satosphere, Society for Arts and Technology
1201, boul. Saint-Laurent, Montreal
Presented in coproduction with OktoEcho, in collaboration with the Society for Arts and Technology and Normal Studio.
From the 5th-century comes to us the story of Saint Marine the Disguised. A woman who lived in the Middle Ages in Lebanon, a Maronite monk, all of her life dressed as a man, who lived through grief, scorn, shame, who raised a child, who was banned from society and when she died, became a saint.
Three women of today, artistic director Marie-Annick Béliveau, composer Katia Makdissi-Warren and video artist Charlie Poirier-Bouthillette, seek out Saint Marine. A spiritual, oniric, feminist encounter. Together, they imagine a lyrical work, a series of tableaux, sometimes theatrical, sometimes musical, with no fixed narrative thread, where the voices of yesterday and today mingle, where languages are understood and questions answered. We invite Sainte Marine to reflect with us, from Lebanon to here, 1500 years later, is being a woman all that different?
Creating a three-dimensional representation of Saint Marine, the immersive technology offers an occasion for a meeting, a sharing. Performers and spectators are brought together to share an aural, visual and human participatory experience.
Based on the hymns of St. Ephrem, the musical material created by Katia Makdissi-Warren combines traditional instruments and electro-inventions, in writing and improvisation.