L’Envol

© Elias Djemil

Direction: Jenny Montgomery
Choreography and performance: Mélissa Merlo
Music and sound design: Uberko
Advisor/”Oeil extérieur”: Jean-François Duke

In life, we are continually starting over. We change, we adapt, we keep going. But sometimes we face an event so monumental that it stops the trajectory of our life, leaving behind only a “before” and “after.” Life as we knew it is in ruins, devastated, as are our hopes and dreams for the future. We look out at a desolate, empty horizon. A void. Or is it the darkness that comes before the dawn?

Like in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, our protagonist receives a call to adventure. She decides to accept it and embarks on an odyssey into the unknown. After confronting death in the “belly of the whale,” she rediscovers herself and begins to reconstruct her sense of home. Her determination to rebuild her life illustrates the human spirit’s capacity to adapt.

A first public laboratory of L’Envol was presented in the program of Les chantiers/ constructions artistiques du Carrefour international de théâtre in Quebec City on May 27, 2016.

Video by Elias Djemil