Flash version here.
A theatre and cinema giant, Raymond
Cloutier has worn many hats over the course of his career: actor, director,
writer, teacher, and radio personality. Since 2007, he has been the
head of the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal. It’s a
role tailor-made for this enthusiast.
Fiction and Reality
Born into a family of hoteliers, Raymond Cloutier attended boarding
school from a young age. It was there that he discovered theatre.
“From the age of five or six, I
was on stage all the time,” he recalls. At first, theatre was merely
a way to relieve boredom at school, but it soon became a refuge. “Thanks
to theatre, my life at boarding school became more comfortable,” he
says. “It made life a little more meaningful.”
His youth was spent, as he puts it,
“not in the reality of a family, but in the reality of fiction and
theatre.” When he was offered a place at the Conservatoire d’art
dramatique de Montréal, Cloutier thought he had found his happy ending.
“I didn’t know what else to do,”
he says. “I was stuck in this fictional universe.” At the Conservatoire
with teachers such as François Cartier and Georges Groux, he learned
the art of performance and how to push the limits of his gift as an
actor. “Everything was interesting to me,” he says of his four years
at the Conservatoire, one of which was spent in Quebec City with Jean
Valcourt and Marc Doré studying creative theatre, improv, and experimental
theatre.
Cloutier graduated from the Conservatoire
in 1968 with great distinction and a wealth of knowledge. The wait for
success was short. Noticed at an improv night, he was offered a series
of unexpected contracts: a role in Le Drap, a play staged in
Strasbourg, and another in Les quinze rouleaux d’argent presented
in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. “I had one contract from October
to late November in Strasbourg, and another one from January to May
in La Chaux-de-Fonds in addition to a tour in Switzerland, eastern France,
and a few performances in Paris. It was a dream year.”
Anything but Ordinary
In addition to being an enriching experience, Raymond Cloutier’s
year in Europe introduced him to the secret life of a theatre troupe.
This “communal and bohemian” lifestyle was based on a cooperative
and egalitarian model in which everyone—the director, the technicians,
and all the actors in between—earned the same salary. The experience
sparked the Grande Cirque Ordinaire, an extraordinary adventure for
the emerging actor. With collectively created shows, the troupe wanted
to make theatre that was “absolutely not alienating,” he says.
Supported by Albert Millaire and
the Théâtre Populaire du Québec, the Grande Cirque Ordinaire staged
nine productions between 1969 and 1978, including T’es pas tannée,
Jeanne d’Arc ? (1969), La famille transparente (1970) and
T’en rappelles-tu Pibrac ? (1971). The latter tells the true story
of a small village near Jonquière that was to be flooded. However,
in the shadow of the recent October Crisis, it was judged too outrageous
and political. Raymond Cloutier and his friends were therefore dismissed
from the Grand Cirque Ordinaire. The setback didn’t discourage the
young actor, so full of ideas and ambition; a few years later he would
produce two solo shows, Mandrake chez lui in 1976 and Le Rendez-vous
d’août in 1977.
From the Stage to the Screen
Alongside his fledgling theatre career, Cloutier also pursued a
career in cinema. He started big with a role in Gilles Carle’s
Red (1970), followed by another in La tête de Normande Saint-Onge
(1975). Working with Carle was not at all easy for the actor, as the
director’s methods were not always compatible with his own. Gilles
Carle, influenced by the documentary school of the NFB, was an adept
at cinema vérité. “He thought that by putting me in real situations,
I would become a better actor.” As a result, Cloutier often found
himself in unexpected situations, such as the time Carle had him attacked
by fifteen men during shooting in order to capture the most authentic
fear possible. “For an actor who had been on stage since the age of
five, who did four years at the Conservatoire followed by a European
tour, it was an absolute insult.”
Following this somewhat disconcerting
collaboration with Gilles Carle, Cloutier continued his cinema career
with, among others, Jean-Claude Labrecque’s les Vautours (1975)
and l’Affaire Coffin (1980), Lionel Chetwynd’s Two Solitudes
(1978), Jean Beaudin’s Cordélia (1980), Brigitte Sauriol’s
Rien qu’un jeu (1983), Jean-Marc Vallée’s Liste Noire
(1995) and more recently, Simon Lavoie’s Le déserteur (2008),
Michel Monty’s Une vie qui commence (2010) and Sylvain Archambault’s
French Kiss (2011). It’s also worth noting that he has also portrayed
a number of prestigious figures on television, including Louis Riel
in the Georges Bloomfield series Riel (1979) and Jean Drapeau
in Alain Chartrand’s series Montréal ville ouverte (1992).
A Passion for Writing
“I always told myself that I should write a couple of novels in
my lifetime,” Raymond Cloutier confesses. The dream became a reality
in 1998 with the publication of Un retour simple, an improvised
novel written in the same manner as the shows of the Grand Cirque Ordinaire.
One year later, it was followed by Le beau milieu, an essay on
the structure of the diffusion of Montreal theatre. In 2000, he published
his second novel, Le Maître d’hôtel. “It’s the divine
side of writing that interests me, that pure and unlimited freedom,”
he says.
This passion for writing and literature
led him to host literary shows on Radio-Canada’s Première chaîne
from 2004 to 2008. During this period, he had to read five novels per
week. From this experience, he concluded that “too many people write
too many novels.”
“It was a bit inhibiting,” he
says. “I thought, if I want to write, I’d better write something
really good, or else it won’t be worth the trouble.” Nevertheless,
his desire to write remains and he has not ruled out the possibility
of publishing another novel.
On top of his creative pursuits,
Raymond Cloutier has a long history of teaching. He has taught the art
of improvisation—“spontaneous creation”—to generations of actors.
“It’s quite moving to see these young people who couldn’t get
up and improvise a few months ago becme masters of substance, balls
of invention,” he remarks.
A passion for youth and the dissemination
of knowledge persuaded Cloutier to resume his post as the director
of the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal in 2007, a prestigious
position that he had held from 1987 to 1995. While he recognizes the
talents and aptitudes of Conservatoire graduates, he confesses that
he has little confidence in their futures. “We need a network of companies,
especially permanent theatres, throughout Quebec,” he says. That way,
young actors, at least the best among them, would have the chance to
be on stage and live their art. “I’m hoping to get the Minister
of Culture to help create stepping stones for these young actors,”
Cloutier says. “We’ve focused so much on the survival of [the French
language], but a language doesn’t survive all on its own. It survives
thanks to literature and theatre.”
Translation: Rebecca Anne
Clark