- Intimacy
- Unveiling
- Identity
About
Jane Ar is a literary performance project created by the author and performer Ariane Lessard, in co-production with Productions Rhizome. Through a device combining text, music and sound environment, technological design and lighting, as well as an original visual identity, the work explores the unveiling of oneself, the intimacy and the construction of female identity through the gaze on body and desire. Ariane Lessard plays a live performance with musician Aaron Leaney in a technological scenography designed by Louis-Robert Bouchard and a visual identity signed Noëlle Wharton-Ayer. Under the artistic direction of Simon Dumas, Jane Ar offers a sensory and incarnate experience, at the border of theatre, music and visual arts. The project, supported by the CALQ, will be presented first on October 10, 2026 at La Charpente des Fauves. The exit from residence will be followed by the launch of the book Jane Ar by Ariane Lessard.
Credits
Text and performance — Ariane Lessard Directing — Simon Dumas Assistance in staging — Tania Bonardo-Pellerin Music and sound environment - Aaron Leaney Technological design and lighting — Louis-Robert Bouchard Visual artist and collages — Noelle Wharton-Ayer Repeater — Étienne La Frenière & Matéo Pineault Production — Ariane Lessard and Rhizome (coproduction) General coordination — Audrey Girard & Edouard Budque Communications — Maude Fiset General and artistic direction of Rhizome — Simon Dumas Initial dramaturgic work (Residence 2024) : Simon Dumas and Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Biographies
Ariane Lessard Ariane Lessard holds a master's degree in literature at the Université de Québec à Montréal. She is the author of Fire (2018, La Mèche), finalist at the Rendez-vous of Chambéry's first novel and soon adapted to cinema. She also wrote School for girls (2020, La Mèche), also (2022, La Ville Brûle). In 2021, she was in residence with the Réseau des autrices francophones de Berlin for the project of the Hotel des autrices, a project for which she composed a novel of which you are the heroine They live on an island.. She is currently working on the production and publication of the novel-spectacle. Jane Ar with Rhizome Aaron Leaney Aaron Leaney is a Montreal saxophonist, composer and improviser active in both jazz and current music. Trained at Thompson Rivers University and Humber College, he has also studied leading figures in North American jazz. For more than twenty years, he has been sailing between jazz scenes and improvised music, notably as a tenor saxophonist at Ratchet Orchestra — a Montréal ensemble of current music presented at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV) among others — and as a member of the trio H ii Regions, winner of the Montréal Conseil des arts Jazz Création Scholarship in 2022. He was also the recipient of an Explore and Create Canada Council grant in 2021, and led a practice of composition and sound design under the name of multiphonicsounds, at the crossroads of acoustics and digitals. Christmas Wharton-Ayer Noëlle Wharton-Ayer is a visual artist and cultural mediator based in Quebec City. She holds a master's degree in visual arts from Laval University and a bachelor's degree in visual arts from York University, and has been developing for more than a decade a practice of print and collage that mixes personal images with found elements. An active member of the Engram Centre, where she was a workshop manager, she presented her work at numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Quebec and abroad, including: Bedfellows (2025) and In undergrowth (2024). A recipient of several scholarships from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, she explores through her works the themes of memory, territory and fragmented identity.