amilton de azevedo writes about Sur tes traces, by Gurshad Shaheman (Iran) and Dany Boudreault (Canada), presented in the 2024 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.

“How many of our shards are used to rebuild ourselves? / Our shattered fragments turn into stained glass lights” [Rico Dalasam – Quebrados (Broken), in a free translation of its lyrics]

“We are definitely not the same, and it’s wonderful to know that each of us is as different from the other as one constellation is from the next. The fact that we can share this space, that we are traveling together, does not mean we are the same; rather that we are capable of attracting one another precisely because of our differences, and that it’s those differences that ought to plot our odyssey” (Ailton Krenak, in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World)

Veils separate Sur tes traces (2024) mise-en-scène and the audience. They also divide the rooms of the apartment created within the set design. The theatricality of such a device – and its use throughout the performance – sends a direct message regarding what is being put into motion on the stage. For there seems to always be something impossible to capture of the complexity of a person and their coming-to-be, even when glaring and wandering deeply into one’s soul. Gurshad Shaheman (Iran) and Dany Boudreault (Canada) share the stage in a quite unique piece that is an attempt of building a cartography of otherness.

Sur tes traces dispositive brings up, in its singular language, the creative process and the realization of the inconceivability of entangling all the fragments of oneself. As Shaheman and Boudreault weave a possible story of one another, the audience is invited to navigate among their voices through the headphone’s channels. In that sense, the experience of the spectator in Sur tes traces is especially individual, as each one is choosing what to hear at every moment of the piece. The entirety of what is being presented is unachievable, as the performance invites the audience to build their own paths through their traces.

In that sense, those who can’t understand French face a challenge: for the dispositive itself, there is a need for two different subtitles, located in a way that one must choose also if they want to understand what is being said or if they want to see the scene composition. It is a logistical issue: as each performer is being translated on one side of the stage, their movement around the entire stage makes it hard to follow. Watching subtitled pieces carries an inherent struggle; in Sur tes traces, the (beautiful) density of the texts and the way that the narratives unfold, mixing up the first persons in the stories, it is almost like adding another veil towards the impossible to grasp.

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Shaheman and Boudreault speaks of their travels into the other one’s life, intimacy, places and pasts; at the same time, they are staging scenes that share ties with what is being told, creating characters to interact and build fictional relations that dialogues to passages narrated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There are moments when one of the performers is talking about exactly what is being staged, but that does not happen all of the time. Cutting an onion, taking a wedding picture, setting up a christmas tree: sometimes what might seem random is actually the presentification of what was at some point left behind – by them, by one’s choice on what to listen – yet still remains.

The development of the documentary piece started in Sarajevo, back in 2022. A meeting point: where East meets West, whatever this may mean. Boudreault then went to Turkey, reaching towards Iran (not being able to enter the country for “diplomatic reasons“, as he tells in the interview for the FTA), and France, while Shaheman was divided between Montreal and Lac Saint-Jean, in Canada. As they shared what they could listen, observe, learn, apprehend of one another, the individual trace of Sur tes traces intention meets macroquestions. The epistemological curiosity moving them deeply into one another is crossed by sociocultural backgrounds, pasts and presents within certain contexts, and now their relation can also speak about the world.

No one exists in the ether. Who one is, were and is yet to become is unavoidably permeated by its surroundings. Family, community, government, religion, culture, ethnicity, financial conditions; everything. One always grows within circumstances, embracing or confronting them. Boudreault and Shaheman movement is to understand what trail lies behind them that brought them to where and who they are now. Their performance can be understood not only by what is shown onstage, but considering this whole investigation of knowing one through otherness eyes and memories – and the manners to organize all that was gathered in order to build a portrait of the constellation that is someone. Sur tes traces, in your footsteps, following a path in the opposite direction, as a path to the past. Places, fragments, tombs. To find and to be found.

On their journeys, it was not only the portrayed one that was found. There is war, there is grief, there is hate; there is joy, there is bliss. There is violence within households and societies; queerness plays an important part of Sur tes traces, both regarding its relevance on the becoming of who they are and on the impulses and necessities of leaving places and leaving people. What is left behind, what stays with us. Acceptance, search for yourself through community-building, movement. At some point of the narrative, talking about the poet Rumi, Boudreault asks himself what says more about a person: where they were born, where they die, where they choose to live?

Where do one roots spread? What does it mean to be from a specific nation? What is a nation? How to graft fragments lived and collected throughout the world onto the original root? As lovers, family and friends tell someone the story of you, many existences will be narrated. Sur tes traces comprehends that there is not a puzzle to be solved, but a scenery to be calmly admired in every detail of its complexity.