Pharmakon

Menka Nagrani’s dance-theatre production, featuring six performers, also makes use of stop-motion video to address the topic of medicine with humour and sensitivity. Remedy or poison, drugs are part of our lives. The right dose for the right emotions, so we aren’t too afraid, so we smile just enough, so we don’t cry too much . . . Keeping us from being overemotional, drawing a line between normal and abnormal.

Les Productions des pieds des mains brings “conventional” artists together with artists with intellectual disabilities to embody these reflections.

What is normal anyway? An explosion of words, pain, poetry in motion and atypical shapes. Pharmakon won a social commitment award and an honourable mention for most remarkable production at the 2011 Gala des Cochons d’or, Quebec awards for emerging theatre.

« Amazing! Exactly what you want from theatre. »
- Jean Siag, theatre critic, La Presse, June 4, 2012

« This creator is at the vanguard of what may become a socially inspiring trend, boldly forcing awareness through the issues she confronts, the way she presents them and her audacious choice of performers. She may be a genius ahead of her time. She may be an icon in the making. »
- Olivier Koomsatira, dance critic, Dance News Montreal, November 20, 2011.