Mandate

We’re bringing your words to the stage. What do you say?

At Porte Parole we dig political dialogue and believe theatre is the best medium to engage in it.

For the past 10 years we have created and performed 7 critically acclaimed plays that have opened up a unique civic arena in Montreal: one where spectators become active and engaged citizens through the transformative power of theatre.

Porte Parole’s stage is the world itself.  Each of our plays dives deep down into the human details of urgent current event stories, empowering our audience to understand the root causes of social conflicts and inspiring them to play an active role in confronting them.

Porte Parole is that link that has been lost in our democratic chain:  the space where each one of us is inspired to become a player in a dynamic political community.

History

In 1998, actor Alex Ivanovici and playwright Annabel Soutar borrowed 5000 dollars, bought a digital tape recorder, rented an economy car and set out on a 3-week journey across Quebec to interview people about the state of the province’s democracy.  It was the rainy month of November and Quebec was in the throws of a provincial election campaign.

Their goal: to create a documentary play based on the verbatim testimony of Quebeckers cut from a wide swath across the province:  from the fishing villages of the Gaspé peninsula to the casse-croutes of the Eastern Townships, from the mansions of Westmount to the factories of the Côte Nord.

Lacking an official title for their ‘research project’, Alex and Annabel came up with the name ‘Porte Parole’.  By recording peoples’ words and bringing them back to be performed on a stage in Montreal, they were acting as ‘porte paroles’ – carriers of language and harbingers of a new spirit of creative civic engagement in Quebec.

10 years and 7 productions later, Alex and Annabel have carved out a precious niche in the Montreal landscape with the hundreds of other actors, directors, writers, designers and theatre technicians who have graced their plays – a niche where bilingual audiences from every point of Montreal’s political spectrum gather to be entertained and to debate the big issues in Quebec.  Health care, immigrant integration, outsourcing, infrastructure – no topic is too dry for Porte Parole’s stage.  On the contrary, we relish any opportunity to turn complex social conflicts into deeply human stories.

In 2010-11 we will be celebrating our 10th anniversary season with the remount of our most recent production Sexy béton at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier in February 2011.

Please join us in the theatre or on one of our online forums to help us continue building cutting-edge public dialogue in Quebec!

Founders

What do a Romanian actor and a Westmount playwright have in common? As it turns out: way too much. Co-conspirators in the theatre since 1997, husband and wife, and enthusiastic parents trying to multi-task their way through life, Alex Ivanovici and Annabel Soutar have been the artistic tag team behind Porte Parole since our official founding in 2000.

Today Annabel writes the plays and raises the money while Alex joins the fun when we’re ready to go into production. Of the 7 plays created by Porte Parole, Annabel has written 5 of them and Alex has directed or acted in almost all of them.

In 2010 with the company they founded still alive, their marriage still intact and their kids in full-day school programs, Annabel and Alex are ready to take Porte Parole to the next level. Stay tuned for imminent remounts of past plays and a new documentary one-man show in the near future featuring Alex in the leading role.

Please feel free to email Alex and Annabel with ideas for future productions, and thoughts about current shows. They love interacting with their audience!

If you are interested in Alex’s and Annabel’s official bios, please click here.