Ana

Ana

Opening the door to an intercultural dialogue

There are several names for the goddess Inanna, the either Sumerian or Akkadian deity of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. Through the eyes of a modern playwright or two her story informs the exploration of modern womanhood and depression, told in two languages from two sides of the ocean, by two artists who witness Inanna’s descent into the Underworld.

Montreal’s Imago Theatre decided to celebrate their 25th anniversary season in style with a multicultural, multilingual, transatlantic theatre project called Ana. Imago’s Clare Shapiro approached Quebec playwright Pierre-Yves Lemieux asking him to write a play about the Inanna myth:

“We wrote a story about a child abandoned on a rock,” he explains, indicating his collaboration with Scottish playwright Clare Duffy of Stellar Quines Theatre. They’d never met before. “It was a pure blind date,” Lemieux says, set up through the play’s director, Serge Denoncourt. One has to admit it’s an odd coupling: a dramaturge from Quebec and a counterpart from, of all places, Scotland. But it seems to make all the sense in the world.

Imago’s mandate is to create works of social relevance, while Stellar Quines “strives to facilitate the creative work of women in theatre,” according to a press release. Despite whatever linguistic divides might have presented themselves, the two playwrights were undaunted. Technology helped to bridge the gap. Once the concept was shaped, the rest was easy. “I created bilingual characters,” Lemieux explains, “or mixed French and English characters.” Some of Duffy’s characters were inserted into scenes Lemieux had written, while some of his characters made their way into her scenes.

Whatever else Ana is, Lemieux says, "she is an illustration of the human condition." “From our birth, we are in exile in a world that has no answer,” Lemieux writes to me in an email. “Like Ana, we carry the day and night. We pay from one to the other trying to forget the passing time.” Ana, he says, is both her own and his way of “celebrating this wonderful creature and senseless life.”

In the end, Ana is an ode to woman and her struggle though time. With a bilingual cast of one man and six women, three of them Scottish, the play opens on November 22 at Espace Go, and runs through until December 10. Then next Spring she’s off to Scotland.

“The theatre world is globalizing,” says director Denoncourt. The Ana Project is an opportunity to “break down the linguistic barriers and offer a theatre experience that opens a door onto a veritable intercultural dialogue.”