The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 39

Pages 39 to 50 Lively Arts People Saturday, February 26, 1977 Found: Performing space to suit small groups Arts I ly defined and structured of the two. Its concept arose from a counter-culture week two years ago when North American artists and writers gathered here to discuss their problems. In September Conventum opened its doors to the public with a program by contemporary music groups Quinton-al Jazz, Arpege and Le Reve du Diable. Backing the project, which hopes to provide an outlet not only for music, but theatre and film as well, are 15 members who cooperatively purchased the $42,000 building. Answering a need for physical performing space is only one of turn's aims, explains Regis Painchaud, a musician and one of the founders of the group.

It is also a reaction to a "crise so-ciale," says Painchaud. "There is a need to express popular culture, not with a capital but the art of the people. We are not artists, even though we are all involved in the arts. An artist is a class thing, and art is what you exhibit in a museum. We are tra-vailleurs culturels." "Travailleur culturel" is Conventum jargon for a worker for the culture of the people, not for a certain type of art.

The 15 "travailleurs" draw no salaries and have no income, explains Micheline Couture, another member. "Some receive unemployment for a while, they eat free at the cafe They do not have time to take on other jobs." If Conventum had any doubts about answering a social need six months ago, it doesn't any more. "In the past month we have turned away hundreds of people at the door," says Couture. "Since Janaury enough groups have approached us about playing here to fill our scehdule for the next three years." Conventum's policy for groups is straight-forward; Admission for all events is $2.50 and groups are paid $250 a run or 60 per cent of the gross recovery at the door, whichever they choose. Conventum's experimental centre From left, Jacques Gaitttt, Jun-Pltrrt RtvMt Painchaud of Co vent urn.

Gazette, ten Sidaway first performed in Powerhouse- Paul Ledoux's play was the By JULIA MASKOULIS of The Gazette Montreal's two new alternate spaces for the performing arts Conventum and Powerhouse Performance Space -are not household words yet, but they soon maybe. Conventum, a converted garage on Sanguinet Street, and Powerhouse, Third album a turning point Harmonium's future a matter couched in an art gallery on St. Dominique Street, don't share a common ideology or structure. But they do have two thing in common: They answer the chronic need for performing space encountered by small groups in this city and neither has yet to receive government funding. Conventum is the more philosophical By JUAN RODRIGUEZ of The Gazette Harmonium's sold-out 10-night engagement at Cinema Outremont is probably the most important happening right now on the local rock scene.

More charismatic appeal has been attained by Robert Charlebois, while more album sales have been garnered by Beau Dommage, but the future clearly rests with Harmonium. Over the past three years the group has been "numero deux" in the Quebecois rock scheme of things; until its third album, THeptade' (upon which the Outremont show is based), it had never seriously challenged Dommage for record sales. The latter was slick, catchy and appealing in a bubblegum advertising-jingle fashion to the blooming nationalistic instincts of the local pop music audience. Harmonium copied the precedents of West Coast rock outfits like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, depending upon the meanderingly universal "peace-and-love-and-sensitivity" ethos as its bread-and-butter. Whereas Beau Dommage chose to rest on its laurels, Harmonium sought to grow musically.

Its image has not changed it still puts forth those introspective vibes, full of fragility of perception but it has become stronger musically, to the point where Duchesne, Micheline Couture and Regis Among those participating will be Theatre Experimentale and several members from the newly-formed Association des Troupes Autonomes Quebe-coises. (ATAQ was formed in January to provide a lobby for groups which do not fit into any category described in the former government's cultural affairs department's Livre Vert.) Organisation L'Eskabel, Les Pi-chous. La Rallonge, La Dame de Coeur, La Belle Affaire and Les Marionnettes Da Silva, all members of ATAQ, are some of the groups participating in the festival. Since Thursday, L'Atelier Studio Kaleidoscope is presenting Beckett's 'En attendant Godot' until Mar. 6.

(The production had a short run last fall at the Bibliotheque Nationale.) Until now Conventum has been but barely. It is waiting to hear whether it will receive a government grant. Powerhouse Performance Space is an outgrowth of the three-year-old Powerhouse Art Gallery and is a mutant that developed out of the Newspace women's project started one year ago. As a result of its involvement with Newspace, Powerhouse hosted a theatre production for the first time a one-woman show on Gertrude Stein. When Newspace ended.

Powerhouse was approached by a group looking for a performing space. It's first show was a new play by Paul Ledoux' called 'Kill devel oped at the Playwrights' Workshop headed by Bob White. Since then, four groups have used the space regularly, says Tanya Rosenberg, a co-founder of the art gallery. "What is most important is that we establish a sense of continuity so we have been trying to hold shows regularly since fall." In October the Painted Bird Co, presented Beckett's in November Beggars' Workshop presented 'Dirty in December, Atheatri-cal Company staged three one-act plays; and until tomorrow, The Painted Bird Theatre Company is presenting 'Fugue. with Louise Pearl as Salome, Alan Cro-foot as Herod, and Maureen Forrester as Salome's mother Herodias.

'Special Occasion' is heard Thursdays on CBC-FM beginning at 9 p.m. and repeated the following Sunday on CBC-AM at 1:05 p.m. CBC-TV made a great many people angry last Tuesday when it changed its mind about the repeat of Prime Minister Trudeau's speech to the U.S. Congress. The repeat had been scheduled for 10:30 p.m.

until it occurred to some of the network brass in Toronto that the half hour before the national news wouldn't allow any time for discussion and analysis after the repeat of the 25-minute speech. So the repeat was re-scheduled at 9 Writer Ledoux says the response to Powerhouse was immediate. "The trouble is not finding plays to put on but finding a place to put them. The groups that perform here are not subsidized by government funding and can't even afford to rent the Theatre on the Main. Most of them are chronically unemployed," said Ledoux, a bartender when he's not writing.

How, then, is the space surviving and who is paying the upkeep of the 3,500 square-foot area rented at $350 a month? "When we aren't using it we rent it out to t'ai chi classes, dance classes, Tanya gives drawing classes and we hold pay-the-rent parties," he added. A steering committee of eight representing each regular group is responsible for that problem. Powerhouse's audience is not the subscription audience of Centaur and Saidye Bronfman Centre. Mostly, it is made up of other artists, writers, poets or students from McGill. "Sometimes well-dressed people between 35 to 55 years of age just wander in and want to know what's going on," said Rosenberg.

The little theatre can squeeze in up to 150 people. But it can only seat 100 because Powerhouse has no more chairs. "We've borrowed 60 and own the other 40, but we've desperately got to get some chairs," said Rosenberg. When they are not busy with practical problems finding chairs, scrapping and sanding floors, and painting Powerhouse members are preparing new shows. i On March 5 another pay-the-rent party will be open to the public.

Later in March follows Genet's "The Maids' by The Painted Bird, and in April 'The Dada Show', a collective work being developed from the writings and works of the Dada art movement by Atheatri-cal. In May Beggars' Workshop hopes to do two one-act plays by Tennessee Williams. But at the moment Powerhouse's fate hinges on whether it will receive a Canada Works Grant to provide jobs for at least five of its "chronically unemployed" members. p.m. with very little in the way of advance notice on 'radio and TV.

The result was that a large percentage of the public missed seeing an important moment in Canadian history. 't. That piece of idiocy, combined with the network's failure to carry Premier Levesque's speech to the Economic Club of New York, doesn't speak well for the decision-making capacities of the CBC-TV news department in Toron- t0- Tonight at 6:30 p.m. CBMT's 'Response' will take an advance look at Quebec language poiicy. At 7 p.m.

'Decision' will explore the roots of the present situation in Quebec with Eric Kierans, Prof. Frank Scott, writer Conrad Black, and Dr. Michael Oliver of Carleton Univ. provides a place where original artistic work in theatre cinema and music can be created and diffused, without the usual pressures of commercial needs of promoters, managers and record companies. Since it started, its program has included mostly music but this is soon to change with four theatre events planned this spring and a month-long festival in May.

The festival will feature morning workshops, afternoon discussions with writers and actors and improvisational work, and performances in the evening. of attitude up (others are bassist Louis Valois, another holdover, keyboardist Serge Locat, singer Monique Fauteux, and reedman Libert Subirana). Much of the album was composed and recorded at Fiori's home studio in Saint-Cesare, where, as Fiori says, "We could live this music 24 hours a day." The creative isolation was tempered by an important outside force conductor-composer Neil Chotem, who' is responsible for the lush classical motifs that drift through Chotem's piano playing also attracted Fiori's attention and consequently the two diverse talents rubbed off on each other to attain a freshness and spontaneity rarely heard in most classical-rock encounters. For drummer Farmer, playing with Harmonium after the anarchic turbulence of Ville Emard has given stability to his playing. "It's really not the same group it used to be," he says.

"They're searching for new ideas, and I'm doing things I could never do in Ville Emard." As for the future, it may all depend upon the way Harmonium reacts to the surge of adulation at the Outremont extravaganza. From this stage, Harmonium will either challenge on the world music scene or fade into local oblivion. It all depends on whether it thinks THeptade' is only a beginning. cluded this season are Ingmar Bergman's 'Scenes from a Marriage" in six episodes beginning March 9, the live telecast of 'La Boheme' from the Metropolitan Opera on March 15, and many more splendid offerings. We'll provide details next weekend.

The CBC English network, which will carry the Met's 'La Boheme' on March 20, has some plans for a live opera telecast of its own. It's the National Arts Centre production of Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos' and we'll see it in July live from the NAC stage in Ottawa. Another Richard Strauss opera comes to CBC radio on March 10 when 'Special Occasion' devotes two hours to the story of Salome. The program will begin with Oscar Wilde's half hour play, followed by the Strauss opera it could conceivably attract an American and worldwide following. Harmonium's peace-and-love has an energy not often heard since the heyday of this genre" of pop music half a dozen years ago.

a two-disc album which took more than four months of recording and a year and half of conception and which has sold more than 100,000 units in Quebec alone, is the turning point in Harmonium's development. By the time the group's run at the Outremont is through (March 5), 13,000 fans will have roared approval for This is the first local appearance by Harmonium since the group expanded to seven members. The expansion, says leader Serge Fiori, is the key to its growth. Fiori still strums his guitar and sings in that earnest eyebrow-twitching manner of his, but he has beefed up his sound with the addition of two former members of Ville Emard Blues Band, the prototype of the "super-jam" group in Quebec. Drummer Denis Farmer and guitarist Robert Stanley play distinctive motifs behind Fiori's murmur-ings, and they've led the way in propelling Harmonium.

'L'Heptade' is the result of the intense musical communication that's characterized the new Harmonium line Brinsley Sheridan's Restoration comedy 'The Rivals' with Beryl Reid as Mrs. Malaprop and John Alderton, Jeremy Brett and Andrew Cruikshank. In April come Ibsen's 'The Wild Duck' with Denholm Elliott and 'Hedda Gabler' starring Janet Suzman, followed by Arthur Wing Pinero's 'Tre-lawny of the Wells', Chekhov's 'The Three Sisters', John Millington Synge's 'Playboy of the Western World' and Bernard Shaw's 'Mrs, Warren's Profession'. Each play is. preceded by a half hour preview featuring someone involved in the production and background about the play, the playwright and the period in which the work was written.

As if that weren't enough, the PBS fund-raising Festival' 77 is coming up soon it runs from March 6 to 20. In cornucopia overflows with drama, opera classics Gaitttt, Jtan-Pltrrt Rivtst SERGE FIORI Flowers on his microphone Television This is proving to be one of the richest TV seasons in memory for opera and drama devotees. The cornucopia has been overflowing for the past couple of months and there's more to come. At the moment the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is in the early stages of its 'Classic Theatre' season of 13 extraordinary BBC TV adaptations of plays by Goldsmith, Voltaire, Sheridan, Ibsen, Pinero, Chekhoy, Synge and Bernard Shaw.

The series, which is seen Thursdays at 9 p.m., began last week with 'Macbeth' and continued this week with Christopher Marlowe's 'Edward II'. Next Thursday Eileen Atkins stars in "The Duchess of Malfi', John Webster's dark tale of a Renaissance woman's attempt to preserve her position, her freedom and her life against the forces Radio 8LVJ by Joan Irwin of corruption and evil which surround her. Then come a biography of John Milton called 'Paradise Restored' with John Neville as the blind poet; Oliver Goldsmith's delicious comedy 'She Stoops to Conquer' with Ralph Richardson, Tom Courtenay and Juliet Mills; Voltaire's 'Candide' starring Frank Finlay and Ian Ogilvy; Richard 4.