Christian Lapointe is a Canadian theatre director, playwright, artistic director, actor and teacher from Quebec. He first became known for staging several plays by the Irish writer W. B. Yeats, and is the author of a group of his own plays gathered under the title Cycle de la Disparition (Cycle of Disappearance). He is the founder of Théâtre Péril and the artistic director of Théâtre Carte Blanche.

Early life and training Born in the Quebec City region, Lapointe was admitted as an acting student at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Québec before training in stage direction at the National Theatre School of Canada, from which he graduated in 2005. In the autumn of 2001 he directed a first triptych of short plays by W. B. Yeats. Following a co-production with a theatre institution in Hanoi and the staging of a second Yeats play, he entered the National Theatre School's advanced directing programme in 2003.

At the age of 19, while working as a fire-breather, Lapointe was injured during a live television broadcast marking the first anniversary of Julie Snyder's programme Le Point J. The accident required skin grafts to his neck and torso and, by his own account, reshaped his relationship to mortality.

Career

Approach An heir to the symbolist tradition, Lapointe's writing for the stage borrows from performance art, is conceived from and around scenic devices, and verges on video installation. As a teacher he has developed a method centred on observable aspects of stage acting, aimed at thickening the performer's presence through the modulation of scenic positioning. Text and gesture are closely bound in his productions and may shift with the energy and attention of the audience, with particular attention paid to the relationship between stage and house, and between reality and fiction. His Petit guide de l'apparition à l'usage de ceux qu'on ne voit pas and Les Jours gris set out this approach.

Death is a recurring theme in his work, rooted in a preoccupation with inhabiting a body of finite duration. In Sepsis, the final instalment of the Cycle de la Disparition, six actors reflect philosophically on their existence from within a morgue.

Productions Lapointe appeared as a performer in Le 20 novembre, directed by Brigitte Haentjens, a performance that earned him a nomination from the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre; he also worked with Larry Tremblay on the staging of L'Enfant matière.

In 2013 he staged Peter Handke's Offending the Audience (Publikumsbeschimpfung). He removed the performers entirely, leaving synthetic voices to speak the text within a direct-cinema installation that showed the audience to itself and, midway through, replayed its own presence in reverse.

At the 2015 Festival TransAmériques he presented — and himself performed in — a piece drawn from the work of Antonin Artaud lasting close to three days and two nights.

His 2016 production of Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde recast the symbolist allegory through an audio-visual staging.

In October 2023 he staged Parents et amis sont invités à y assister, a drama in four scenes built around six stories, adapted from the book by the Saguenay author Hervé Bouchard, winner of the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

His work has been presented in numerous Quebec institutions as well as at the Festival d'Avignon, the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Schaubühne in Berlin, and on several occasions at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the Carrefour international de théâtre de Québec and the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, in addition to presentations elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Teaching After teaching at the National Theatre School of Canada for close to eight years, Lapointe began a residency there as artist and teacher. He subsequently taught acting at the École supérieure de théâtre of the Université du Québec à Montréal until 2021.

Constituons! In 2019, in partnership with the Institut du Nouveau Monde, Lapointe launched Constituons!, a project proposing that Quebec be given a constitution written entirely by citizens selected by lot and representative of the demographics of Quebec society — conceived as a test of theatre as a popular agora. It drew support from more than a dozen theatre institutions across Quebec as well as from Quebec academics. The resulting citizens' constitution was formally tabled in the National Assembly of Quebec on 29 May 2019 by the independent member Catherine Fournier. A documentary play of the same name was subsequently toured through many regions of Quebec.

Deepfake and moving-image work In June 2022 Lapointe directed the British playwright Martin Crimp as the performer of his own play Not One of These People, Crimp's first stage appearance. For the production, Lapointe devised a live deepfake system animating GAN-generated avatars through facial recognition.

In 2024 he extended this interest with an experimental film made entirely by the same process, adapted from Head in Flames by the American author Lance Olsen. The film brings back the filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the painter Vincent van Gogh, adding the figure of van Gogh's killer to form a cinematic "oratorio" for three voices, following the structure of Olsen's book. Lapointe has described the work as an act of commemoration of the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004.

Music Lapointe is the composer for the group LiY, alongside the Montreal creator Laurence Dauphinais (voice and melodic line) and the British playwright Simon Stephens (lyrics).

Published works

Trans(e), Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, coll. "Scène_s", 2010, 76 p. Anky ou La fuite / Opéra du désordre, followed by Petit guide de l'apparition à l'usage de ceux qu'on ne voit pas, Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, coll. "Scène_s", 2011, 117 p. C.H.S., followed by Sepsis, Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, coll. "Scène_s", 2014, 114 p. Constituons!, Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, coll. "Scène_s", 2019, 152 p. Les Jours gris, illustrated by Vincent Giard (after Lionel Arnould), Montreal, Les Herbes rouges, coll. "Scène_s", 2021, 84 p.

Selected stage productions

2001: Le Chien de Culann (after At the Hawk's Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer and The Death of Cuchulain) by W. B. Yeats 2002: Hoi Sinh / Dichotomie 2003: The King's Threshold by W. B. Yeats 2005: Faisceau d'épingle de verre by Claude Gauvreau 2006: Axël by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam 2006: La Nuit des calandrystes by Daniel Danis 2006: Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill 2007: C.H.S. by Christian Lapointe 2008: Vu d'ici by Mathieu Arsenault 2009: Anky ou la fuite / Opéra du désordre by Christian Lapointe 2009: Nature morte dans un fossé by Fausto Paravidino 2009: Limbes (after Calvary, Resurrection and Purgatory) by W. B. Yeats 2010: Trans(e) by Christian Lapointe 2012: Sepsis by Christian Lapointe 2012: L'Enfant matière by Larry Tremblay 2013: Offending the Audience by Peter Handke 2013: Oxygen by Ivan Vyrypaev 2013: L'Homme atlantique and La Maladie de la mort by Marguerite Duras 2015: In the Republic of Happiness by Martin Crimp 2015: Tout Artaud?!, after the work of Antonin Artaud 2015: Sauvageau Sauvageau, after the work of Yves Hébert Sauvageau 2016: Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck 2016: Les Beaux Dimanches by Marcel Dubé 2017: La Vie littéraire by Mathieu Arsenault 2018: Portrait of Restless Narcissism (PORN) by Nadia Ross and Christian Lapointe 2018: The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from Cinema by Martin Crimp 2019: Constituons! by Christian Lapointe 2022: When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other by Martin Crimp 2022: Titre(s) de travail by Natalie Fontalvo, Lauren Hartley, Odile Gagné-Roy, Christian Lapointe and Marie-Ève Lussier 2022: Not One of These People by Martin Crimp 2022: We Are Shining Forever, after La Morte by Mathieu Arsenault 2023: Parents et amis sont invités à y assister by Hervé Bouchard 2024: Head in Flames by Lance Olsen 2024: Découronné.e.s by Herménégilde Chiasson, Céleste Godin, Georgette LeBlanc, Mélanie Léger, Jean-Philippe Raîche and Gabriel Robichaud 2025: Use et abuse, after L'Économie esthétique by Alain Deneault, co-created with Alix Dufresne 2026: Hiroshima mon amour, by Marguerite Duras 2026: Laarm de Ploers, by Christian Lapointe

Awards and nominations

2007: Protégé, Siminovitch Prize, chosen by Brigitte Haentjens 2010: Winner, John Hirsch Prize, Canada Council for the Arts 2011: Nominee, Prix de la critique (AQCT), best male performance, for Le 20 novembre 2013: Winner, Bourse Jean-Pierre Ronfard, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde 2014: Winner, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for Oxygen 2015: Winner, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for Tout Artaud?! 2016: Finalist, Siminovitch Prize 2016: Winner, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for In the Republic of Happiness 2016: Winner, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for Sauvageau Sauvageau 2018: Winner, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for Portrait of Restless Narcissism 2019: Finalist, Siminovitch Prize 2019: Finalist, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from Cinema 2022: Finalist, Prix de la critique (AQCT), for Titre(s) de travail

References

External links

Théâtre Carte Blanche Christian Lapointe – À voix haute Christian Lapointe's page at CEAD

Biography In October 2023 Christian Lapointe staged Parents et amis sont invités à y assister, a drama in four scenes with six stories at the center, which earned its author, the Saguenéen Hervé Bouchard, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

References

External links Christian Lapointe - À voix haute Christian Lapointe's page at CEAD