February 12 with english surtitles.

Winner of the 2000 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Jean Marc Dalpé’s novel Un vent se lève qui éparpille (Scattered in a Rising Wind) introduces a ragged chorus of troubled voices. Geneviève Pineault stages her own adaptation of a raw and compelling tale whose characters are driven by passion, desire and hatred.

Jean Marc Dalpé received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in 1998, for Le chien, and again in 1999 for his play anthology Il n’y a que l’amour. In 2000 he scored a hat trick when he received the prestigious award a third time, for his debut novel Un vent se lève qui éparpille (Scattered in a Rising Wind). In this tragic tale with Faulknerian overtones, Dalpé interweaves a multiplicity of troubled voices, mingling French and English in a hybrid tongue both rough and sophisticated. Those voices belong to Marie, Marcel, Joseph and Rose. Fanned by passion, desire and hatred, their seething emotions drive them to commit murder, suicide and incest. In the harsh setting of a working-class mining town in Northern Ontario, the inhabitants seem crushed by the burden of a fate as inexorable as the outcome of a Greek tragedy.

Director Geneviève Pineault was captivated by this shattering tale from the moment she first read it, shortly after she became artistic director of the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario. Struck by the novel’s poetic, dramatic and imaginative style, she determined to adapt it for the stage, together with fellow dramaturgs Johanne Melançon and Alice Ronfard. Performed by an exceptional six-member cast, this new production reunites Pineault with Jean Marc Dalpé: the two have collaborated previously on two plays by Mansel Robinson, SLAGUE – l’histoire d’un mineur and II (deux).