Exploring the abyss in search of glimmers of light, working alongside creators she met in Japan, Marie Brassard presents the fruit of a poetic reflection on the perception of time and the learning of brutality. She reveals unsuspected worlds in a surreal tale rich in sound and images.

It started with the sentence “Look, it looks like a little Japanese flower that hasn’t been born yet,” uttered by her two-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter, Léone, while looking at a dot in a book of prints. Marie Brassard seized on this idea of a birth in a crumbling world, embodied in the child’s notion, and, like Alice going down the rabbit hole, proceeds to tell us, in her mesmerizing voice, a series of enigmatic stories about the forms of ordinary violence that pervade our lives. In this antechamber of sorts, she encounters the living, ghosts, beings who are waiting to be born or reborn—including the singer from her childhood, Renard like a fox—and female characters inspired by Japanese culture and mythology.

Hybrid and dreamlike, this new creation by the bewitching Marie Brassard and her company Infrarouge is at once an ode to the gravity and beauty of children’s imagination, an exploration of catastrophe and the power of art, and a reflection on the violence of nature protecting itself from humanity. Brassard is surrounded by her loyal team, including musician and sound designer Alexander MacSween, lighting designer Mikko Hynninen and set designer Antonin Sorel, joined by visual artist Sabrina Ratté and and a team of Japanese performers.

Original songs

Le temps des cerises : Jean Baptiste Clément and Antoine Renard
Rain and Tears : Evangelos Papathanassiou and Boris Bergman
Kaimonobugi : Written by Masawo Murasame and Ryouichi Hattori. Published by Hattori Music Publishing (JASRAC). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

*Performed in French with English subtitles

Developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.