La mort est un cheval
Project Overview
The discovery of La mort est un cheval by Wajdi Mouawad in the NST archives during my residency sparked an intense creative journey. Raw and allegorical, the text demanded more than direction — it called for embodiment, collaboration, and transformation.
Guided by directors Philippe Racine and Nini Bélanger, I immersed in a year of research, dissecting rhythm, structure, and the ethical pulse of the work. With dancer–choreographer Sona Pogossian, we explored the feminine and anger: metamorphosis - the project’s dramaturgical core. Composer and sound designer Laure Anderson shaped the piece’s sonic and visual universe, where light, breath, and silence collide.
The performers - Aida Sabra, Lebanese Canadian actor, and Neil Sochansky, Canadian American dancer - embodied Emma and her counterpart through an interplay of body and voice, merging the physical and the allegorical. Together the scenographer Joanna Gourdin and the technologist Armando Menicacci (Scènes Interactives Technologiques) transformed the prison setting into a shifting space of confinement and release.
Created in Montreal, the work united a team of neo-Montrealers around a voice confronting today’s fractured world - where love, violence, and exile coexist. Presented at Théâtre Aux Écuries, during my artist residency (2024–25), and supported by the Montreal Arts Council & Menuentakuan Productions, the piece was recorded in radio format at Studio Makina.
La mort est un cheval was a metamorphosis - a multidisciplinary exploration of identity, power, and transformation through embodied theatre. It affirmed my artistic path: to question, include, and transcend - both self and collective.
This work embodies my artistic practice - a multidisciplinary, multicultural exploration of identity, power, and transformation. Facing today’s urgent realities with inclusivity and drive to reimagine both self and collective, and fearless engagement with otherness. Theatre as an act of endless renewal.
My deepest gratitude to my extraordinary team, to Théâtre Aux Écuries, and to the Montreal Arts Council for their unwavering trust.
And to the Author - thank you for the spark that set this creation in motion.
Fantaisie de Désuétude
This play is a question. That is, certainly, the feeling it provokes from its first lines and images. What is our fundament, to what certainties may we hold fast? Consider the characters. There are three: Orlo, Simon and Lilith. Orlo has lived thoroughly and, through his mischief, turns the others towards their existence. Simon seeks his tangled literary path, stuck within his quietude, his habits of smoke and drink. Lilith is pure movement. She emerges to transform the others, their bodies mired while their spirits thrive. Fantaisie de Désuétude is their story, their press to escape confinement. Who can say what might happen? Who can predict the alchemy of atoms?
Text and AD by V. Hovanisian
With Marie-Claire Marcotte, Vincent Leblanc-Beaudoin, Said Ben