Ravage of Life

For three years, Evelyne de la Chenelière wrote on the long entrance wall in Montreal’s Espace GO as part of an artistic residency that would profoundly shake her outlook on words, theatre practice, and writing. The culmination of this is Ravage of Life, a bold departure from prevailing norms where the playwright breaks with written and performative conventions in her dramatization of an endless and multi-faceted instant between life and death. In this experimental text, bits and pieces of a family’s realities unfold in a non-linear simultaneity that reflects with captivating irony the difficulties encountered when language is expected to facilitate communication. Ravage of Life is a challenging invitation to eviscerate theatre and create a space where thought finds its body, freeing theatrical languages from grammatical constraints, logic, and structure in order to promise new theatrical experiences.