amilton de azevedo writes about Pompèries et pyromanes, by Le bureau l’APA (Canada), presented in the 2025 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.” (Greta Thunberg’s Our house is on fire speech)

“For a long time, we have been alienated from the organism to which we belong — the earth. So much so that we began to think of Earth and Humanity as two separate entities. I can’t see anything on Earth that is not Earth. Everything I can think of is a part of nature” (Ailton Krenak, Ideas to postpone the end of the world)

Within the french word for pyromaniac, lies the word for novel. To create is to set fire. Igne natura renovatur integra: through fire, nature is renew in its entirety. As announced in the title of Martine Delvaux’s book that triggered Le bureau de l’APA to stage Pompières et pyromanes, the work is about those who set up and put down fires – an important detail: pompières refers to female firefighters. Pompières et pyromanes is not only a homage to women and the fires they faced throughout history, but a feminist call to action regarding how one deals with the perspective of an imminent end.

To make an nonfiction essay, written as the letter of a mother to a daughter, a performing arts work, Le bureau de l’APA, informing the audience since the beginning, chooses not to build characters, neither “tell a story”; when they do things, they do it for real – their words. Pompières et pyromanes is structured around reading excerpts of the book entangled with instructions on what to do if in a fire. There is also live music, toasters burning breads, fire alarms going off, real smoke and its smell taking over the venue, the toasts are being glued to a cardboard house being made, protest panels being painted and hanged, tons of clothes and other disposable waste, a short movie projected in a white curtain that kind of drops out of nowhere, and… well, did I mentioned a giant slide surrounded by plants in the middle of the stage?

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The set is an adaptation (by Jasmin Bilodeau) of a work by BGL, a Quebec city art collective, called La source. Performers climbing stairs and joyfully – ok, not always (yes, I am thinking about the washing machine moment) – sliding down; the dispositive is responsible for many of the visualities proposed by Le bureau de l’APA throughout Pompières et pyromanes. As the work brings up several fire-related myths and facts, the audience hears about Prometheus, punished by Zeus for giving fire to the humans. Yet, another Greek figure seems to be wandering around: Sisyphus. 

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy”, wrote Albert Camus. To find – or, better, to create meanings. Delvaux writes for her daughter, joining voices with the newer generations to stand up for the future. When Pompières et pyromanes starts, all the performers introduce themselves from the perspective of their relationship with maternity and motherhood. Not having or not wanting to have children is an individual decision not only considering the brink of society as we are experience, but at every moment of one’s life; if it is not that that will provide the meaning for being here and believing and fighting for a better future, reasons will varies within each one experience – even accepting a meaningless existence and being ok with it. In Pompières et pyromanes, these hopeful Sisyphus slides down the hill knowing the importance of climbing it back up again. Burn what it takes, restore it all; igne natura renovatur integra. 

Even being quite didactic, Le bureau l’APA’s work does not paternalize their audience – the message is definitely being sent, but there are no magical solutions being offered. As individual and collective responsibilities are in the equation, they repeat: we must cross the t’s – and dot the i’s – in capitalism. Doing such may result in the realization that it must be destroyed (what, in fact, happens as they perform this action sliding down the set dispositive). 

Ensembled as a collage, Pompières et pyromanes seems to recognize the contradictions within the work, allowing them to be there for the spectators to gaze upon such intricate questions with a dialectical perspective. A diverse cast regarding ages and experiences, with a LSQ interpreter integrated to the show itself, is too a glimpse of what is the future desired: inclusive, worried with the unknown other, equals in their difference. As the house is already burned, let us long for a future built by witches, bitches, pyromanic firewomen. Igniting, with the fire of the desire, the will to change.