In genre-busting Malaise dans la civilisation, four oblivious characters dismantle expectations and unleash chaos
Surprises await in Pi Theatre and Théâtre la Seizième show, as co-creators Alix Dufresne and Étienne Lepage embrace their “interior idiots”
Photo by Julie Artacho
Théâtre la Seizième presents Malaise dans la civilisation at the Scotiabank Dance Centre March 7 to 9
IN THE SAME DAY that Malaise dans la civilisation received an absolute drubbing by a prominent Quebecois theatre critic, it was also invited to the south of France as part of one the most prestigious festivals in Europe.
It says a lot about a work that challenges the audience but also the very mechanics of theatre itself. One miserable writer aside, the show has otherwise been met with universal astonishment and praise.
“You can see a lot of shitty shows but you almost never see shitty reviews,” says Alix Dufresne, co-creator with Étienne Lepage of Malaise dans la civilisation. “And we had a really shitty review. This one was, like, “Ugh, there’s no show.’ We were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we were trying to do, very hard, we worked for two years to bring you No Show.’”
In Malaise dans la civilisation, four oblivious characters mount the stage and proceed to dismantle expectations in a comic orgy of atavism, self-discovery, and destruction, leaving everything in chaos including the theatre and all the people in it. You can read more about this genre-busting work online, but it’s probably best not to dilute the experience, and Dufresne is necessarily a little cryptic about things. The original title—translated from the French, of course—was Stupid Galaxy Shit.
“I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s a bit on the nose,’” says Dufresne, who is climbing out of a snowsuit when Stir reaches the National Theatre School grad by Zoom, having arrived at a small cabin by Ski-Doo on the super-remote Île Verte, or Green Island, located in the St. Lawrence Estuary.
“It’s not like a douchebag sport,” she reassures us. “It’s the only way of getting from A to B.” Matters of conveyance notwithstanding, Dufresne is very eager to bring Malaise dans la civilisation (a direct reference to Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, aka Blöder Galaxien-Scheiß) to the West Coast after some 15 performances in its home province, where it was generally presented “in very post-modern festivals, very niche, contemporary-art theatre festivals,” largely prompting a reaction she describes as: “What the fuck?”
The roots of Malaise, for one of its principles, at any rate, can be found in Lars Von Trier’s magnificently offensive 1998 film, The Idiots. Beginning in 2021 with Lepage and four actors, Dufresne made it her mission to “find our interior idiot. Let’s see where that goes. And then with that, Étienne started throwing in philosophical questions. We have idiots asking themselves philosophical questions, and as they do so, they do not take care of each other, they do not take care of the theatre, and they do not take care of the public. They destroy everything, like a phagocyte, like this bacteria that’s very dense, bumping into each other but then taking over the whole space, and trying to care for each other and ending up molesting each other as they do it, so…”
There’s little more to add, besides Dufresne’s view of Malaise as “a bit of a metaphor about being—the word in French is inconscient, which is not careful or not conscious about each other and ourselves, which is what capitalism brought us to. The state of the planet, the state we’re in, because we’re running around bumping into each other being totally not conscious of each other and ourselves in the world. That’s what we do, but in a very idiotic way on a stage.”
Photo by Julie Artacho
It’s an inaugural collaboration between two sympathetic but formally very different young talents. Notable previous works include Dufresne’s Hidden Paradise, a quasi-dance piece about tax evasion and austerity, and Lepage’s Logic of the Worst, based on the work of the dour French philosopher Clément Rosset. They share political orientation, but Dufresne is drawn to the physical and perhaps corporeal aspects of performance. (Small spoiler: Malaise includes vomiting.) “I’m more interested in the compulsions of life,” she says. “I’m like the beast, I like working with compulsions and scratching your ass and sticking your fingers in front of the audience, thinking as a living being without the brain, and seeing how far this can go.”
Lepage is the cerebral one, with a special interest, she says, in “cruelty.” During a two-year marathon of onstage writing and improv, Dufresne would frequently find her partner “staring at a blank wall and sweating because he has so many ideas and he’s doing this philosophical analysis of everything. I think that’s his way of surviving. Everything needs to be explained, everything needs to be analyzed, but he’s very punk also. He really goes far into an idea of pulling away all of the emotions from rationality, and rationality, when it’s really nude, can be very brutal.” With a smile, she adds: “It’s a fun mix.”
Copresented by Théâtre la Seizième and Pi Theatre, Malaise arrives in Vancouver for three nights starting Thursday (March 7) at the Scotiabank Dance Centre with a cast that shares credit as co-creators. “They’re natural-born clowns, so the more they could do, the better,” says Dufresne. “Most are very prolific, they do cinema, they do TV, theatre, and some are, like, ‘I could stop my whole career and do this show the rest of my life, I wouldn’t mind.’ That’s a nice thing to hear but they really wrote the show with us, so many of the wonderful things in this show come directly from them, from the improv, from the idiot-people they created. These characters are based on them. They use their real names. To the contrary, we had to restrain them because there was too many ideas and we had to make choices.”
For what it’s worth, Dufresne offers a brief description of the four idiot-people we’ll encounter—“One is dangerous like a snake, another is a guru that has nothing to teach, another is a giant toddler, another is like the tight-ass of the gang…”—but that’s really enough information for now. The real promise of Malaise clearly lies in the unexpected. "We wrote the show like an ascending dramaturgy so you don’t know what’s going on and at the end you’re saying, ‘Holy Fuck, I didn’t know we would end there,’” she promises. “People are meant to be surprised because you should’t see the evolution of how dumb and wrong it is.” 
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