December 6, 1989: In memory of the victims of Polytechnique

In memory of the victims :

Reminder: a commemoration will be held on December 6th, on the belvedere of Mont Royal.

Special event
Projet Polytechnique: A Year Later

Prelude by Alex Ivanovici, Co-founder of Porte Parole.

In the autumn of 2023, ahead of the performances of Projet Polytechnique at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, I invited a select group of people to see the production and to write a formal reflection about it. I didn’t give any instructions, but the idea was to give life to the discussions on the issues raised by the play, after the relatively short duration of the performances.

With the help of Zoé Boudou, then an intern at Porte Parole, we drew up a list of candidates.

We approached Pascale Devette, a professor of political science at the Université de Montréal, (to get the thoughts of a woman who) because she has been following the issue of violence against women and the femicide of 6 December 1989 for several years. Having already participated in public discourse on feminist issues, and having grown up with a great uncle who was a teacher in the class where the carnage began on December 6, 1989 at École Polytechnique, the richness of Pascale’s reflections made her an obvious choice. She agreed.

I approached Yves Boisvert, a columnist for La Presse, because he had written about deciding not to see Denis Villeneuve’s 2009 film Polytechnique. I wanted to know if he was open to coming to the theatre 14 years later to see Projet Polytechnique. He agreed. He wrote a column about the performance on December 6th 2023. 

Then I thought about the theatre, the form, and I approached a couple: Joseph Shragge, an English playwright, and Lynn Kozak, a professor at McGill and an expert in ancient Greek literature. I had played in their fascinating adaptation of Euripides’ Medea at the Centaur Theatre, produced by Scapegoat Carnival Theatre, which Joseph Shragge co-founded. They accepted. They wrote in English.

These 4 essays form a fascinating and diverse collection about Projet Polytechnique that I am so pleased to share with Porte Parole’s community one year after the production’s premiere. I hope you find them as stimulating as I do and as always at Porte Parole, we’d love hear what you think.

L’anorak in theatre until 7 December 2024.

This year, I reunited Pascale Devette, and the authors of Projet Polytechnique, Marie-Joanne Boucher, and Jean-Marc Dalphond, into our recording studio for a conversation based on Pascale Devette’s reflection – La peur et le pardon. 

To go further

To read