Feu à l’Olympia, Jeremy Peter Allen

I grew up in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood. For me, the Olympia space had never been anything other than a parking lot. A few years ago, I was surprized to learn that a large cinema stood on the site for the first half of the 20th century. I found the transformation very ironic, given that these majestic movie halls were gradually shut down in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in favour of suburban multiplexes, often on the pretext that there wasn’t enough parking available nearby.

The Olympia, later the Théâtre Canadien, was destroyed in 1946 in an arson fire. When Avatar invited me to create an audio work to be presented on the site where the cinema once stood, I wanted to evoke this period of great movie theatres while also commenting on the transformation due to more utilitarian and automotive reasons. The 1940s were marked by Film Noir, a troubled America just coming out of the war, and soldiers returning from the front to find a transformed society in which women had developed new skills and ambitions.

Using a fictional register, yet inspired by actual facts reported in newspapers at the time, I created a crime radio drama, a kind of cousin to Film Noir and just as popular then, about the last days of the Théâtre Canadien. In order to take listeners back in time, I formally tried to work with sonic and musical textures typical of the 1940s, as well as some of the same technical limitations: mono sound, voice registers modulated according to a limited frequency range, background noises and distortions related to radio broadcasting.

Voices: Éric Leblanc, Jean-Michel Déry, Vincent Champoux, Jack Robitaille, Alexandrine Warren

Historical advisor: Jérôme Ouellet