Christian Lapointe

Christian Lapointe (born 1978) is a Canadian theatre director, playwright, and artistic director from Quebec.

Born in Quebec, Christian Lapointe studied at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Québec.

In the fall of 2001, he directed a triptych of short plays by William Butler Yeats.

Following a co-production with a theatrical institution in Hanoi and the staging of a play by Yeats, in 2003, he trained in directing at the National Theater School of Canada, graduating in 2005.

He is the founder of the Péril theater and artistic director of Carte Blanche.

At the Festival TransAmériques 2015, he gave a performance lasting almost three days and two nights around the work of Antonin Artaud.

He performed in the play Le 20 Novembre, conducted by Brigitte Haentjens.

His performance earned him a nomination for the prize of the Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre.

He also worked alongside Larry Tremblay for the play L'Enfant material for the staging.

Over time, he established himself as a moving figure in Quebec theater.

In Sepsis, the last opus of the Cycle de la Disparition, six actors philosophize about their existence from a morgue.

Moreover, death is a recurring theme in Lapointe's works; being in a body that has a limited lifespan is an idea that obsesses him.

Following the symbolist movement, the writing of his shows borrows from performance art, is conceived from and around scenic devices and sometimes uses video installations.

He is the creator of a pedagogical methodology centered on the thickening of the presence on stage by the modulation of scenic positioning within the framework of actoral theatrical practice.

Particular attention is paid to the relationship between stage and hall and reality and fiction.

His Petit guide de l’apparition à l’usage de those qu’on se pas et Les Jours gris testify to this approach.

His works have been presented at the National Arts Center in Ottawa, at the Carrefour international de théâtre du Québec and at the Festival TransAmériques.

After having taught at the National Theater School for nearly eight years, in 2016, he began an artistic residency as an artist and teacher there.

Then, he was professor of interpretation at the École Supérieure de Théâtre until 2021.

In 2019, he launched Constituons!, in partnership with the Institut du Nouveau Monde, a process that proposes to provide Quebec with a constitution entirely written by citizens selected by lot and representative of the demographics of Quebec, within the framework of the theater as a popular agora.

It is supported in this process by more than a dozen theatrical and academic institutions throughout Quebec.

The Citizens’ Constitution of Quebec that emerged from this process was officially tabled in the National Assembly of Quebec on May 29, 2019 by independent MNA Catherine Fournier.

In June 2022, he staged Not One of These People, by the British author Martin Crimp, who made his stage debut as an actor in the piece.

For this performance, Lapointe imagines and designs a live deepfake device that animates, through facial recognition, avatars generated by Generative adversarial network.

In October 2023 Christian Lapointe staged Parents et amis sont invités à y assister, a drama in four scenes with six stories at the center, which earned its author, the Saguenéen Hervé Bouchard, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

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