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PORTRAIT
Raymond Cloutier
One passion, Many Domains
by ROXANA PASCA
atheatre 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 Con servatoire 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,
PHOTO Alain Tremblay
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.”
LSM
TRANSLATION: REBECCA ANNE CLARK
DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012 49