Interview with Rémi Jacques, Jean-Félix Bélanger, Ève Pilon-Senterre and Jacinthe Racine for 'GLOB' [part 2]

This interview with Rémi Jacques, Jean-Félix Bélanger, Ève Pilon-Senterre and Jacinthe Racine continues from the end of Part One. If you missed it, catch up by clicking here.

Ellen: Your relationship as clowns, how does it evolve? You’ve been working together for a while now. 

Rémi: Ha! Ha ha ha! Hee hee hee!

Ellen: How do you approach your relationship with each new work?

Jean Félix: The way we see clowns, and that we can see a difference between theatre and clowns, is that what you bring on stage is what you are. Most clowns know this, you are working on who you are, you're working on your qualities or your flaws and you bring that on stage, and then you can have a real interaction with the-

Rémi: Connection

Jean- Félix: With the connection with the audience. 

Rémi: It's not a theatre. You start with your particularity, so-

Jean-Félix: So the duo that we bring on stage is the same (a small laugh) that we have in life. 

Rémi:  Go Jean-Félix! Go go go go down now now now! 

Jean-Félix: I'm a white clown, he's a red clown. I’m more serious. He's more…creative and full of energy. 

Ellen: Did you say white clown before? 

Jean-Félix: Yeah. White clown, red clown, if we are going to the theory of clowning.

Rémi: Each show I create, it's an inspiration with different types of the clown so for Brotipo  it’s an American clown or for Kombini  it’s the Russian clown. So you study the character of this country and you search in your personality what is the connection with that? And so, okay, for Kombini, Jean-Félix is so sweet in real life so for this show I search in your personality and your character the… anger. What's your anger part and I work with that. For me, I work the vulnerability. Okay, vulnerability, okay. And this show, you concentrate on that.

So you pick up all the time, one.. Parcel? 

Jacinthe: Pieces… a small part. 

Rémi: Pieces, a small part in your personality and you work on the show with this particularity. It's a big engagement because you don't have a choice and you have a big confrontation with…. With…

Jean-Félix:  Who you are. 

Rémi: Who you are. But I like that. 

Ellen: This next question is a bit more abstract…I wanna ask have you, as artists, have you had moments where you've crossed a threshold? What moments have felt like ‘crossing a threshold’. 

Jean-Félix: I'm not sure of the meaning of threshold.

Ellen:  I have it in French! 

(We’re sitting on tables across the road from the theatre and the sun is now directly on us so we pause to move to the wall of the Théâtre des Luminoles which showcases the posters of the many shows happening there per day)

Ellen: Are you ready? Quel moments avez vous eu l’impression d’avoir franchi un seuil ?

Rémi: In the work? In the show? In the creation?  

Ellen: Any! As artists, things you’ve felt in yourself, things you’ve felt making work…

Jean: I think that, especially in Glob…there was a point that we felt that it was something bigger than us that we were creating. In the show there is something. We were working, working hard and working on the thin line of is it boring or is it interesting? We did one show that was really boring and we had to rework and, and say, okay, we have to find the solution. To bring this show to its peak… Rémi was working really, really hard with his creativity and all his brilliance. 

Rémi: It's an obsession. An obsession. 

Jean-Félix: And then we presented it and it was working. And then we continued to present it and there was something (there). Because even in the pictures of the show people were saying, I want to see this show. So, okay… the costume has something. And then people were seeing it and saying ‘you made me feel so good with this’,  then we went to Spain and presented it and it was the same thing. I don't know… people were living something... And for us, like we were saying earlier, we were doing the same show. 

Rémi: But you work.

Jean-Félix:  You work. We are working. We are doing the rhythms. We are doing the movements. The acrobatics and we finish a show and then people say (Jean-Félix gestures to me), like you said, ‘Oh my God, the piano!’ and you are talking about little, little things like,  ‘I almost cried when you say goodbye’. And in this show we were feeling that as a duo on stage we did many things, but for this show, there's something clearly bigger…

Rémi: Bigger, bigger… 

Jean-Félix: Bigger than us reaching the crowd…and we’re just working the best we could do! It’s not… (Jean-Félix pauses, the thought dangles and is left)

Rémi: Each show, it's a precious moment for work more, more… and better and focus. This is my obsession- this timing! This 3 seconds! I think ah, (this moment) it’s not on the track. Maybe I work, I work, I work. So each show for me, it's, it's all the time a work in progress,  but it's a very, very big partition. So it's clear. And the result is that it’s bigger. It's bigger than us. 

Jean-Félix: It's the precision of each choice. And it's like, if you take different elements, it's all great. It's all beautiful. But altogether takes it to another level. It gets to the magic of something else. 

Ellen: (To Ève and Jacinthe) From a technical perspective, what is your relationship with the audience like?

Jean-Félix: We’ve never asked this ourselves, I’m curious about the answer.

Jacinthe: It's a special show because I've been there since the beginning so I don't actually look at any cue sheet. I know it by heart. So I'm really focused with the stage to see where we're going, what's the timing to enter the cue. But the audience, I can feel when they listen. And I can feel like when they’ve jumped in the show, they melt into everything. I feel very, very privileged and it's like I'm in it, but I'm outside of it. It's a position where you can feel all the energy even. The one on stage, the one of the crowd and what you bring like to when you get when you do some cues. It's precious.

Rémi: Precious! 

Jacinthe: It’s precious. 

Ève: To add to what Jasline said: the energy of the audience and the energy of the artist.. Sometimes the cues have to be just a little bit earlier or just a liiiiittle bit later to catch the right moment to jump back. With the applause also, you wait so the audience can really feel it. And then go back to the show. So you have to jump with the audience and the artist too. 

Jean-Félix: That’s the hard part to do, that’s the hard part to learn!

Ève: Because as they say, clown, it's really about timing.

Ellen: Are there recurring feelings that you have noticed through all of your work?

Jean- Félix:  People mostly say after the show, oh, your complicity is really special. The friendship, the relationship. That's the kind of thing that people really see. 

Rémi: It's two guys, it’s rare, your complicity with two guys is a very beautiful thing. 

Jean-Félix: So no matter what, what kind of show we do-

Rémi: All the time.

Jean Félix: If there’s different energy. This is the main thing that we continue to create.

Rémi: It's love! Yeah! It's my best friend. I'm your best friend? Oh yes. Okay.

Ellen: What, or who, has influenced the way that you make theatre? 

(There’s a collective “oooh” and then Rèmi makes a low rumbling sound)

Rémi: It’s a lot, okay, short story: I’m young and I watch every presentation, theatre or show, and I don't really like that. So for me, it's too much, realist. “Oh again, an apartment”... And finally, I watch a big show at the commedia dell’arte and I go… oh ….this show is very different with the mask and the movement and the people laughing. So, I like that. So I studied commedia dell’arte for a long time and after I just passed a different school, a professional school in the theatre, and I found the clown. I work the clown, the clown, the clown and I finish my school in the theatre and I return to the movement, to circus, and I put clown into the equation. 

A big influence is Meyerhold, a big creation of the movement on stage for the dancer and actor. For me, I think it's a really good technique for the creation (as I noted in my interview with Sophie Charbert, in french 'creation' refers to a devised process) and the other guys Bernard Lavoie, a big name in the USA, and he’s finally just come to Montreal and he created a technique with words, it's very interesting. And I put these two things, a couple words and the rhythm and (Rémi makes a “pop” sound, “smash”, and a “pfft” sound). And this is my big influence and I have one master, my master I passed 10 years with approximately, I work with the rhythm. 

Jean-Félix: Robert Dion.

Rémi: Robert Dion. So,“No Rémi! More slow! More fast! No, Rémi!” This is my biggest influence. And my character. 

(Laughter) 

Jean-Félix: And his stubbornness! (Jean Félix punctuates his laugh “Ha, ha, ha!”)

Rémi: Yeah!

Jean-Félix: To build his own company and do his own thing. 

Rémi: Yeah! Create new shape, new form, new texture for the show for people who don’t know clown. 

Ellen: Other influences for you, Jean-Félix?

Jean-Félix: Well, yes I’m in the company, but I'm now I'm more like a student of Rémi because it's his company, his artistic direction and we all go into that direction for the company. So I could say it's Rémi.

(Laughter)

Jacinthe: He has his own way of seeing things. So we have to understand the energy to get him what he wants. 

(A big laugh from the group…There is a crowd of people forming a line to go to the next show and we are being pushed closer to the wall)

Jean-Félix: I think this will probably have to be the last question. 

Ellen: In that case, if there is anything brewing in your mind that you would like to say, to finish on? 

Jean- Félix: One last thing is what we’re doing… because we talk about doing clown but what we’re really working on is bringing back clown. Because for us there are a few good clowns on stage right now and some are doing clown in a way that we don’t and it’s not always really good with the audience. And so that's why people are scared of clowns or people are like it's only for birthdays. Or it's just weird things.

It’s like, oh no, you can bring this art on stage again, today, and make it actual…and make it real. But you have to work a lot. Really more than most of the clowns that we know and you said it yourself, it's hard (before the interview started, I told Jean-Félix about my first experience in clown state during a workshop with Giovanni Fusetti and how challenging I found it). You're working on yourself. You're working on the body. You're working on the rhythms. You're working on the acrobatics. But when you're doing it well, when you put all your energy in it and you really put reflection in it… Then it can work. It can work. You can reach the public and it can be real. Through all the theatre field.

Ellen: A perfect note to end on. 

Les Foutoukours: https://lesfoutoukours.com/fr/accueil/

Thank you to Lucie and Quartier Libre for organising this interview: https://quartierlibre.fr/en/