Olivier Choinière, a Montreal-based playwright, is the winner of the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize – the richest in Canadian theatre
Olivier Choinière was attending his mother's birthday party in a suburb of Québec City when Siminovitch Prize jury chair John van Burek got in touch with him.
The day turned into a double celebration as the Montreal-based playwright found out he was the winner of the $100,000 prize – the richest in Canadian theatre.
"I still don't have a plan for the money," said Choinière, still in shock a few days after receiving the news. "I'm still not at all in that reality yet."
The Siminovitch Prize is awarded on a three-year cycle to a director, a designer or a playwright. This year, Choinière, 41, was nominated for the mid-career honour alongside three widely produced dramatists: Michel Marc Bouchard, Hannah Moscovitch and Colleen Murphy.
Choinière, who is the first francophone Siminovitch winner since director Brigitte Haentjens in 2007, was the odd man out in this group.
English Canadians, if they know him at all, know him for 2007's Félicité – a script translated into English as Bliss by British playwright Caryl Churchill – in which four Walmart employees tell a dark and dreamlike tale about Céline Dion and one of her biggest fans.
As bizarre (and brilliant) as Félicité is, it has characters and a story – and so fits into a practice not that far off from the work of Bouchard, Moscovitch and Murphy.
But Choinière is also known in Quebec for less traditional work. Chante avec moi (Sing with me), which just closed a run at the Théâtre du Trident in Quebec City, is a theatrical flash mob that features 50 performers singing an infectious tune over and over – and subversively questioning our need to belong.
With his company L'Activité, Choinière also pens déambulatoires, or podplays, that the audience listens to on headphones while walking around. In 2011, Choinière's most notorious déambulatoire took an audience into the upper balcony of Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, where he provided secret commentary on a production of Molière. Dubbed a "theatre hacking," it provoked months of debate over its ethics and audacity.
"I guess the jury saw all the aspects of writing in those projects that we think are not at first sight real plays," says Choinière, who will direct his latest, Ennemi Public (Public Enemy), at Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui in February. "I think the author in theatre is not just the author of the dialogue, but the person who reflects on the theatre in its entirety."
As his protégé – who will share $25,000 of the prize – Choinière has chosen, Annick Lefebvre, who astonished the older playwright with her 2013 tragedy, Ce samedi il pleuvait.
What's distinguishes the Siminovitch Prize from other honours is that it is not just a reward for an individual play or production, but an investment in an artist at a time in mid-career when they often hit financial hurdles. (Choinière, incidentally, has a one-year-old daughter.)
Its influence can be seen in the fact that both the French and English theatres at the National Arts Centre are now run by Siminovitch winners (Haentjens and Jillian Keiley).
Where the Prize is most vulnerable to criticism – that it slots theatre artists into constrictive categories of directors, designers and playwrights – its juries have consistently shown that they're willing reward boundary pushers.
They first did that when they chose Ronnie Burkett, a puppeteer who could fall into all three categories, as the winner for design in 2009. Now they've done it again with Choinière – a win that will hopefully bring his work to larger attention in English Canada and inspire others to hack into playwriting practice.
J. Kelly Nestruck