Jean Marc Dalpé

Gabriel Dumont's Wild West Show is a flamboyant epic, constructed as a series of tableaux, about the struggles of the M tis in the Canadian West. It is a multilayered and entertaining saga with a rodeo vibe, loosely based on Buffalo Bill's legendary outdoor travelling show. In 1885, following the hanging of his friend Louis Riel, bison hunter Gabriel Dumont fled to the United States. There he was recruited by the legendary Buffalo Bill, founder of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a gigantic outdoor travelling show that re-enacted life in the American West. It made a huge impression on Dumont, and he dreamed of putting together a similar show to tell the story of the struggle of Canada's M tis to reclaim their rights. The creative team behind Gabriel Dumont's Wild West Show - including ten authors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, French- and English-speaking men and women - brings Dumont's dream to life in a captivating, joyously anachronistic saga. The theatrical version of Gabriel Dumont's Wild West Show presented by the National Arts Centre was one of a number of exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts' New Chapter initiative. (Adapted from nac-cna.ca/en/wildwestshow.)

Initialement publi en 1999, « Il n'y a que l'amour rassemble huit pi ces en un acte (dont «Trick or Treat et «Give the lady a break ), trois contes urbains, une conf rence et un texte po tique pour une voix. Le jury qui lui a attribu le prix du Gouverneur g n ral soulignait que le livre « donne une parole ceux qui n'en ont pas et que, dans le th tre de Dalp , « il n'y a pas de jugements; que de la compassion .

In a small town apocalypse, the social order of things can no longer prevail against the larger forces brought to bear on its insular, traditional, incestuous community. Marcel, in a cleansing, destructive rage, sets his murderous sights on the powers that rule this world. Scattered in a Rising Wind records this rush of events barely at the edge of syntax; a teeming imagination always just ahead of the ability to articulate; with a participatory narrator that scrambles to keep up with the unfolding perceptions within the characters that surround him. Set in a tiny claustrophobic mill town north of Sudbury, the language borrows the reader to animate its utterly amoral characters as embodiments of the most elemental of human passions. Almost devoid of the conventions of punctuation, capitalization and other grammar rules designed to control language and enforce its sequential linearity, occasionally breaking its prose margins to become minimalist utterances, the novel constantly moves into "a future that has nothing to do with the past." Yet the past is constantly re-constructed backwards in all its recurring archetypes by the characters, their actions, even their names. Just as the narrator says of the main character, Marcel, "a lot of what he thinks he remembers is invented," the reader is left, in the end, with Marcel's Oedipal revenge, the incestuous passion of a Joseph for a Mary of divine birth, and the barren rose of love echoing like a shot to the head, a tattoo on the heart. There is no time here.

«Jean Marc Dalp r ussit concilier recherche formelle, po sie et langue parl e (...) La violence de ce monde est traduite avec une vivacit exceptionnelle qui met en jeu une motion vive allant jusqu'au d sespoir . ( Jury, prix du Gouverneur g n ral.) / L'histoire de Marie est celle d'un drame qui lentement nous est r v l travers la narration de trois diff rents personnages qui l'ont connue et aim e. Passion, d sir, trahison, abandon sont autant d' l ments qui composent ce roman aux accents lyriques et violents dont la langue et le style t moignent admirablement. Roman incendiaire, polyphonie de voix emm l es et ent t es, ce vent qui parpille n' pargne rien ni personne, pas plus ses personnages que son lecteur: car l'histoire de Marie appartient l'inconscient collectif autant qu' la passion singuli re; c'est une histoire qui remue nos motions comme notre m moire. « Un vent se l ve qui parpille est le premier roman de Jean Marc Dalp .