Perchée sur la
boîte noire
Conceived in Montréal in February 2023, Perchée sur la boîte noire was born from a single view, a cityscape that mysteriously echoed a distant landscape from my childhood in Armenia, with its music, colors, and scents.
Each dawn, at the same hour, I returned to this horizon through a ritual of presence and automatic writing. For seven mornings, seated on the theatre’s black box, I was accompanied each day by a piece of Armenian music chosen in advance, guided by the emotion this view awakened in me, a thread connecting memory and homeland.
What began as observation became an act of reconnection, a dialogue between writing, sound, and sense memory. Surrounded by the fragile symbols of childhood, I explored what remains of freedom, of roots, of wonder and how the gaze itself can become performance.
Perchée sur la boîte noire is a meditation on renewal, memory, and the shifting line between the seen and the felt, where theatre meets the intimate landscape of the self.
Created, Written & Performed by V.Hovanisian
Exploration du Sensible
Errance
Exploration du Sensible is a poetic and visual research project built around the concept of errance — wandering as the search for totality. It began with a line from A. Laumonier, cited in Raymond Depardon’s Errance: “Errance is certainly the story of a totality sought. For errance is neither travel nor stroll... but rather: what am I doing here?”
I reimagined this phrase as the framework for my inquiry and creation: Errance — the story of a totality sought. What am I doing here?
Developed during my residency at the NST, the project investigates errance through the prisms of nature, memory, and the body, tracing how the act of wandering becomes both question and revelation. At its core lies the Sensible, which I define as: “That which is received and transmitted through the six senses — hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight, and intuition. It rises first beneath the skin, moves through the blood to the heart and mind, leaving to the soul the impossible task of deciding which of them must respond. Its manifestation depends, perhaps, on chance — and on the degree of light present.”
Drawing on Mariama Bâ, Camus, Cioran, Davoyan, and Depardon, this exploration unfolds between the poetic and the visceral, where emotion becomes form, and form becomes encounter.
In my practice — theatrical, visual, performative, or written — the poetic and the sensible are inseparable: twin forces in constant tension and dialogue. They question, transcend, and complete one another. My process seeks to disarm both reason and emotion, opening a space where meaning yields to sensation, and where the poetic becomes a bridge toward the Other.
Through image, light, and space, Exploration du Sensible embodies my artistic pursuit: to build bridges between the visible and the invisible, the rooted and the displaced, the self and the Other — allowing theatre, installation, and performance to merge into a single, living, and sensitive language.
I & I
A reinterpretation of a scene from Chekhov's The Seagull.
"Music plays from a nearby bush and Vik Hovanisian appears in the foliage wearing a long, flowing black dress and does an interpretive dance. It’s quite impressive and graceful. She tells us quietly about her background, the meaning of her name and that she has lived in various European cities. She is a French and Canadian multidisciplinarian artist who works in several languages—many of which she spoke during her segment. She lead us out of the woods and into the park where we sat in chairs and she sat on the ground and asked us questions to get to know us better. The questions were thoughtful, not intrusive, certainly made us think about things that were important to us, and created a connection to her. Fascinating."
Lynn Slotkin
Co-created/written: D. Bartolini, V. Hovanisian
Images: L. Hovanisian & M. Jbara
Spectators' Odyssey
o dell'Inferno
Inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey and Dante's Inferno, the terms 'Odyssey' and 'Inferno' are used as metaphors and re-imagined to be two distinct epic journeys for the audience: BLUE and RED. In BLUE, audiences voyage through the remote parts of the backstage areas of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, rediscovering what it means to be a “spectator.” In RED, audiences venture through the streets of the surrounding neighbourhood, finding themselves inside the St. Lawrence Market after-hours – a place of exchange where worlds meet through stories. The project borrows the great sense of wonder of the poems that inspired it, with each audience member becoming a modern-day Ulysses and Dante: a voyager.
Co-created: DLT and multiple artists
Photography: Zahra Saleki
Her Sweetness
Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.
Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose
An experimental and improvised performance based on Elle by Jean Genet, with the Other HeArts collective.
Co-created: Vik Hovanisian & Other HeArts
Photography: John Gundy
You Asked for a Story
A war. From elsewhere. An elsewhere that is home.
Իմ փոքրիկ Հայաստան. The violence that besets us can seem distant, unreal. And my only reality, shared in body and heart through a world of Armenité.
Ans bombs rain down on cities and villages, they fall on naked heads. Phosphorus scorches ancient woods. Mercenaries hack bare necks, human necks. Schools, hospitals, churches and houses fall to pieces under heavy shells. And here, now, still, oil’s filthy dollars buy the silence of a willing world. What is a world? There are many, and we are trapped within one.
Text: M. D. Pettit, V. Hovanisian, L. Glück, H. Arendt
Virus
From these peculiarities, these mysteries, these contradictions and these symptoms we must construct the spiritual physiognomy of a disease which progressively destroys the organism like a pain which, as it intensifies and deepens, multiplies its resources and means of access at every level of the sensibility.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre & The Plague
Experimental work exploring creation and confinement, presented for Fringe TO 2020.
Co-creation
Dir: H. Thomas
One Night
Set in contemporary Lebanon, One Night follows the journey of Abdulhakim, a young man tortured by the loss of his brother. Dissociated from his homeland and himself, he returns to reckon with the origins and outcomes of violence. Throughout, he is guided, challenged, healed, and rejected by Scheherezade, an apparition of the original story teller of the 1001 Arabian Nights, and the repository of memory for Abdulhakim and his ancestors. Incorporating performance art, storytelling and theatre, One Night interrogates how the stories of the past can inform, transform, heal and render the wounds of the present.
Text: Y. Kadura
Dir: H. Thomas
24H de Créations Clandestines
Set in contemporary Lebanon, One Night follows the journey of Abdulhakim, a young man tortured by the loss of his brother. Dissociated from his homeland and himself, he returns to reckon with the origins and outcomes of violence. Throughout, he is guided, challenged, healed, and rejected by Scheherezade, an apparition of the original story teller of the 1001 Arabian Nights, and the repository of memory for Abdulhakim and his ancestors. Incorporating performance art, storytelling and theatre, One Night interrogates how the stories of the past can inform, transform, heal and render the wounds of the present.
Text by Yousef Kadura
Directed by Harri Thomas
What is the role of the artist in a climate emergency? (…) In these times, I feel quite powerless with respect to the environmental crisis, which certainly represents one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century… If theatre is a product of human creativity and allows us to imagine alternatives, let us come together to find solutions to the crisis. We who create imaginations, we have a duty. That of reflecting the context of the world in which we, too, live. It would be our job to listen, look, touch, feel and even taste what’s around us and to put it all into question.
Dillon Orr, Artistic Director
An intimate, ambulatory journey unfolding in the hidden corners of La Nouvelle Scène Gilles Desjardins, Ottawa, that brings together French artists from across Ontario. The artists have 24 hours to create a whole work. In small groups, the artists will create a performance in areas of the theatre usually inaccessible to the wider public (e.g., dressing rooms, laundry, box office, kitchen, security halls and control rooms). The audience wanders from place to place to see these different pieces, which together constitute a single, in situ and eclectic oeuvre.