Vers solitaire (OUT)

When I buy my ticket to see Oliver Choinière's Tapeworm (Out) (Vers solitaire) at Montreal's Théâtre La Chapelle, the only human presence at the venue is the woman in the box office who takes my money and hands me a pair of headphones and an MP3 player. She directs me to start the show by stepping into the men's washroom. I'm not surprised, as I'm aware that one of the things Choinière creates is ambulatory performance pieces—and this is exactly why I came. For the next couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon in April, Montreal's cityscape, a stranger I'm supposed to meet out on the street, and the soundtrack on the MP3 player will be my dramaturgy. What I don't know is where we'll go or what will happen on our trek.

It's not the young Québec artist's debut experience with such innovation. An earlier show called Welcome to…a city where you are the tourist, also a walk, played at Ottawa's National Art Centre in the Québec Scenes event and elsewhere. One of a new generation of performance-makers upending black-box conventions, Choinière uses theatre like an anthropologist employs a pick—as a tool to unearth and examine our quirky society in its ongoing spectacle where there is no "off-stage."

Alone in my washroom cubicle, a note in the toilet bowl tells me to turn on the MP3 player from which I receive basic operating instructions and directions to walk out to the street and follow the person waiting there for me. Voilà! Outside, a young man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a dark, narrow tie, eyes me briefly with no particular interest. He resembles more a young Jehovah's Witness skipping out on his mission than an avant-gardist performing subtle theatrics in the street. As I follow him down St. Lawrence Street listening to surrealist commentary on top of a montage of city noise in my earphones, I feel like Faust following Mephistopheles into the underworld.

As if perceptions have been sharpened by the situation, I begin wondering if everything I see has been set up for me, or if the banality of a Saturday afternoon near the Place des Arts Metro station just seems particularly potent: the man sprinting up the stairs, past me, and out the front door, could be a malfaiteur. Are they actors, the couple in the midst of a domestic quarrel, threatening to abandon one another by boarding trains in opposite directions then kissing passionately?

"Boom," tones the voice on my MP3 player. "I want to blow this city up after I eat some food in its underground concessions. I am so hungry." As though someone guides the wireless control on me, just then I am walking in front of the pastry and sandwich counters in Montreal's subterranean maze of corridors. "Jesus, look at the chocolate cake. Boom!" All of a sudden, I am hungry too. Screeching metal and other ambient urban sounds provide cover for the mocking, garbled voice on the recording. "I need some money," my audio companion murmurs.

Ambling on, my partner and I mutually respect a "theatrical" distance of about fifteen feet. Like so many complicit urbanites, we are obediently connected yet distant. He stops to examine a poster and glances furtively. I do the same then look around to see if this is just our duo (a trio with the recording), or if anyone else is performing with us. We are in an underground plaza beneath Chinatown where many people, particularly the elderly Chinese, seemed parked for an untimed rest on benches surrounded by fake, potted trees. The voice on my recording feeds me Babel, and I give up trying to follow a narrative. I make more sense of it as only a slightly exaggerated soundtrack mix of what I might be hearing if I wasn't listening...