In the run-up to their upcoming show, Un poulpe peuple la ville, the Kali & Co company is taking over the former Jacques Cartier prison for a “work in progress”, the fruit of a residency spent in the prison over several days. Tentacule #2 comes after a first tentacle was presented at Les Halles en Commun in July. With a team of actors drawn from the fringes of society, the company began work on texts by Jeanne Benameur (notably L’homme de longue peine, a monologue in which a female painter visits a prisoner on a regular basis and sees her life turned upside down), accompanied by original music by Laetitia Shériff.

Sometimes prisons get tired and become too old, too small, too dilapidated. They let everyone out, but keep the stories, the suffering, the pain, the anger and tattered lives inside them.

By working from inside the former Jacques Cartier prison, seemingly empty of life but still full of stories, Kali & Co wanted to poetically restore some dignity to the place, as if the men and women who lived there could tell us something, without us seeing or judging them. Jeanne Benameur’s story gives them the opportunity to tell us what they couldn’t say before they left in an intimate moment, a chosen silence and corner of their existence that we never got to see.