Programming

For forty years, DARE-DARE has embraced the art of the wide stretch: hybridizing practices, shifting perspective, moving beyond its walls, slipping into the everyday, and turning public space into a site of living, open-ended experimentation.

To mark this luminous, unruly trajectory, the centre is proposing a gesture equal to its spirit—expansive, generous, slightly audacious: 40 Years – 40 Hours – 40 Artists. A continuous crossing, with no curtain call and no final bow—just a sustained current, an inhabited vigil, a constellation of presences flaring up and answering one another.

From Friday, March 27, 2026 at 8:00 p.m. through Sunday, March 29 at noon, the Jean-Brillant Studios will become an effervescent artistic encampment where time itself becomes material. Forty hours to test duration, to let ideas steep, to allow bodies to think differently. Performances won’t line up politely; they will brush against one another, overlap, perhaps even spark new trajectories.

True to its ethos, DARE-DARE brings together emerging voices and artists who have shaped its history. Generations enter into dialogue; practices rub shoulders: poetry, contextual art, furtive interventions, performance, collective manoeuvres, scores for voices and silences, embodied narratives, relational devices, and sonic, visual, or material explorations. Some proposals are cobbled directly from the real; others are finely woven from concepts. DIY or radical, intimate or expansive—all driven by a shared desire to experiment otherwise.

The event unfolds in four-hour thematic blocks, like chapters in a collective novel, each carrying its own atmosphere: an electric night, a contemplative dawn, a fragile morning, an unruly twilight. Artists are invited to inhabit a time slot as one steps onto a stage, attuned to the energy of the hour. Time becomes raw material; duration, a playground.

Punctuated by shared meals, spontaneous surges, collective gestures, moments of drift and attentive watchfulness, these forty hours are conceived as a porous, hospitable, shifting space—a place where artists and audiences meet without hierarchy, where one can linger, return, take part, observe, or simply be. A space to slow down, to overflow, to improvise. To weave real, felt, unexpected connections.

To celebrate forty years is not to look back nostalgically, but to reactivate a founding energy: art as experience, as friction, as a generator of the unforeseen, as a critical celebration. To mark this anniversary in this way is to refuse the commemorative album in favour of a shared encounter. It is to affirm that art is first and foremost a way of being together—attentive, playful, rigorous, alive. 40 Years – 40 Hours – 40 Artists is an invitation to inhabit an intensified present together—to set ideas, bodies, and imaginations in motion—and to project, with audacity and joy, the next forty years.

With: Sylvie Cotton · Nicole Brossard · Lise Nantel · Marie-Andrée Rho · Massimo Guerrera · Stéphane Gilot · Raphaëlle de Groot · Jean-François Prost · Victoria Stanton · karen elaine spencer · Marie-Suzanne Désilets · Christine Brault · Jean-Pierre Caissie · Douglas Scholes · Belinda Campbell · Éric Létourneau · Nadège Grebmeier Forget · Anne-Marie Ouellet · Sophie Castonguay · Danny Gaudreault · Helena Martin Franco · Sylvie Laliberté · Hugo Nadeau · Nicolas Rivard · Maggy Flynn · Michelle Lacombe · Laurence Beaudoin Morin · fernando belote · Fannie L’Heureux · Marie-Pierre Brassard · Gabrielle Desgagné-Duclos · Yohann Francoz · Madeleine Guastavino · Flo Mailhot-Léonard · MJ Desharnais · Diego Valera · Agustina Belén Pedrocca · Céline B. La Terreur · + surprise artists