Present, expanded
It’s spring, against all odds, as always. This OFFTA blooms, blossoms, and opens up to be shared. It reveals a plural and changing scenery, generous, bursting.
Our cycles are polymorphous and connected. When embracing their lushness, let’s also recognize the ruins and grief accompanying them. Let’s thank the faint light emanating from the works we haven’t been able to experience in these past troubled years. Let’s contemplate the cadence that links trouble to dawn, and see the hands that are reaching for each other, between the breathless and the flourishing.
This (very) long winter has brought us bright and bursting blooms. The works around which we will gather have grown in a fluctuating context, between dazzling brilliance and pitfalls.
Some are filled with a powerful and defiant hopefulness, while others have found the strength to look straight into the awful, the monstrous and the unacceptable. Others have simply found themselves, mouths open to an intoxicating adventure.
Some have long cultivated this desire to be shared, others will unravel themselves for the first time before you, fresh and green. Their cycles haven’t all been the same, but the dizzying feeling of the encounter is shared by all.
This is how the OFFTA returns to you, transformed as we all have been by the events of the last few years. It is within this tension between renewal and a return to our essence that we find ourselves gathering once again.
May this landscape offered to you reawaken, reactivate, and regenerate those of us who may be going through darker seasons, but whose voices will soon uplift us. May these proposals nourish our next impulses.
This festival is the 16th to be presented by LA SERRE, and my first as artistic director. I take on this brilliant legacy, handed to me by Vincent de Repentigny. For all the hatchlings you have protected, and the rich space you leave us with, thank you Vincent.
May this celebration be impetuous, indocile and filled with solidarity!
Claudel Doucet
Artistic and Co-Executive Director
and the whole festival team