I wanna live, I wanna give
I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold
It’s these expressions I never give
That keep me searching for a heart of gold
And I’m getting old

NEIL YOUNG

The Quebecer creator and his company Ex Machina are names historically linked to this festival and it was fitting and right to include one of his works in our 40th edition. 887 is the number on Avenue Murray in Quebec of the narrow flat where Lepage lived as a child along with his three siblings, parents and sick grandmother. A working-class family that is revived in this production thanks to the stage magic that Ex Machina unfurls like none other. Lepage doesn’t just employ technology, he works magic with it and is capable of seducing and conquering us, moving and thrilling us until we are like children again, our mouths dropping open in astonishment and feeling new things that we cannot exactly define. And all with a level of sophistication and smartness in the staging that few could match.

Thus, 887 is an incursion into the world of memory. Of memory as a survival mechanism and of memory as an artistic tool, especially in the case of actors. There is also a question about how he finds a personal memory, an echo and influence, in collective memory. All those names of streets, of parks and of monuments try to fix an idea in the memory of what already happened. Who decides what we should remember and what we shouldn’t? Why does trivial information stick in our minds while other more useful information fades away? The hidden face of memory is forgetting, but we are living in strange times, as we let ourselves forget many things because there is a planetary digital storage mechanism that amasses mountains of data, the fuel of the 21st century. All of these questions are distilled into a narrative in which Lepage, somewhere between theatre and conference, exposes viewers to the torments of an actor who, in order to survive, must remember, first the text he is telling us and, then, his past, the historic and social reality that he inherits and inhabits.

The work starts at an odd time when Lepage is trying to recite a poem at a public event in Montreal, although he is having a really tough time learning the verses. It’s this difficulty that leads him to start pondering thoughts about memory and ageing. And from there the importance of what we remember and how we remember it, both individually and collectively. ‘Throughout history – says Lepage – the first step that a totalitarian regime takes to ensure the complete eradication of a culture is the burning of books, which tends to be followed by the murder of folk singers, storytellers and actors, who hold inside their living memory songs, poems and theatre works.’ Thinking of memory is also to start remembering. It is inevitably travelling back to childhood and to the historic time in which we were born. Thus, Lepage lands in the years of crisis of the identity of Quebec, ‘as if the most distant memories of intimate events were incomplete without the social context in which they took place. To me, 887 is once again my humble attempt to take an interest in history – with a small h – to better understand history with a capital H.’

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand
We got department stores
And toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people
Says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn
Got roads to drive
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world

NEIL YOUNG