Montreal designer Stéphanie Jasmin wins $100,000 Siminovitch Prize

UBU theatre company’s co-artistic director and designer Stéphanie Jasmin is this year’s winner of the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize, the richest award in Canadian theatre.

While the prize is given out on a three-year cycle to a director, a playwright or a designer, the Montreal-based theatre artist could have qualified in any of its categories.

In addition to her work in video, multimedia and set design, which the Siminovitch jury called “heart-stopping,” Jasmin directs and has even written a pair of plays.

That’s because for her and UBU, the internationally acclaimed company that has been her creative home since 2000, theatre is a holistic art form.

“For us, the form and the content are always interrelated and questioned at the same time,” says Jasmin, who runs UBU with her partner, director Denis Marleau.

With an art-history degree from L’École du Louvre in Paris, and another in filmmaking from Concordia University, Jasmin – who was born in the small riverside village of Neuville, Que. – created shows that were interdisciplinary long before that was a buzzword, bringing the languages of the visual arts and film to the theatre.

Live video of actors’ faces projected onto mannequins in UBU production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Les aveugles in 2002.Siminovitch Prize Photos

In a groundbreaking UBU production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Les aveugles in 2002, for instance, Jasmin projected live video of actors’ faces onto mannequins, to astonishing effect.

Indeed, the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier was so struck by the show when he saw it at the Festival d’Avignon in France that, a decade later, he had Jasmin and Marleau create talking mannequins for a high-profile retrospective of his work that toured museums around the world, from Montreal to London to New York.

A scene from Les Marguerite(s), which Jasmin wrote and designed and is set to tour Europe next year.Andre Cornellier

Recent productions of note that Jasmin has designed include Les Marguerite(s), which she also wrote and which is set to tour Europe next year, and Le Tigre bleu de l’Euphrate, which played at the National Arts Centre’s French theatre in October. Her work has been seen on stages big and small, from L’Espace Go in Montreal to the prestigious Comédie-Française in Paris.

“The jury spoke of the frisson, the shiver that they felt when encountering her work,” Vanessa Porteous, jury chair of the Siminovitch Prize, said in a statement. “Perhaps what struck them most is how her beautiful and highly original visions reveal deeper aspects of the story, the text, or the subject, aspects that otherwise might have passed unseen.”

In an interview in advance of the announcement of her win, Jasmin said she was honoured to be nominated alongside fellow designers Itai Erdal, Camellia Koo and Alexander MacSween – and spoke of the “exceptional character” of the Siminovitch prize, which is given to an artist mid-career, rather than for a lifetime achievement.

Jasmin's Le Tigre bleu de l’Euphrate played at the National Arts Centre’s French theatre in October.Siminovitch Prize Photos

“It’s a time where you have a lot of ideas in your mind and you feel a little bit more secure to explore and risk things, so it’s really a good time to have an impetus like this to continue,” she said.

A quarter of the Siminovitch cash is earmarked for the winner to pass along to a protégé – and Jasmin has selected Max-Otto Fauteux, a 2010 graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s set- and costume-design program, who has since worked in Quebec, in France and in Belgium.

The 18th annual Siminovitch Prize will be celebrated at a ceremony hosted by playwright Tomson Highway at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Monday.