Let’s travel back in time to March 2021. We’d been in lockdown for over a year, and under curfew for six months. Live concerts had become a thing of the past and the government blithely asked performers to reinvent themselves (because that’s so easy to do!) Many musicians began distributing pre-filmed concerts recorded without an audience. While these filmed concerts provided an alternative to live music and allowed musicians to fulfil their need to perform, watching them filled us with a certain degree of nostalgia. Wouldn’t it be better to be there with them, rather than watch, knowing they were playing to a hall peopled only by cameras?

Marie Davidson, the electronic musician behind the 2016 album Adieu au Dancefloor, was planning a tour with her new group L’Oeil Nu to promote their latest album, Renegade Breakdown, released in September of 2020, when the lockdowns began. Forced to cancel or postpone their performances, the singer-songwriter and her team reached out to filmmaker Denis Côté to record a concert for the anxiety-ridden COVID-19 lockdown era. Much more than a simple live recording, Côté has created a genre-defying docu-drama with a dystopic edge, filled with masked concertgoers and high-octane musicians. The end result is one that allows the viewer to truly feel as though they are present: an illusion created through clever cinematography in which the camera strays away from the performers and wanders among the audience, capturing a couple deciding to passionately make out at the edge of the crowd or a good friend of the musicians as he takes a smoke break outside the venue. These small moments, ones that every concert-goer is familiar with, lend Renegade Breakdown Live a distinct narrative quality that goes far beyond a simple recording or livestream.

True visionaries, Davidson and Pierre Guérineau were telling us five years ago, “Le port du masque est de rigueur,” (“Masks are mandatory”) when performing together as Essaie Pas. So it’s no surprise to see them shining, at the apogee of their artistic journey, in Renegade Breakdown Live, using the limitations of this unprecedented global crisis as a force for creative innovation.
 

Frédéric Savard
Archivist and programmer