For three years, Evelyne de la Chenelière wrote on the entrance wall of Montréal's Espace GO theatre as part of an artistic residency that would profoundly shake her practice. The culmination of this is La vie utile [translated as Ravage of Life], a bold departure from prevailing norms where the author breaks with textual and performative conventions in her dramatization of a multi-faceted instant between life and death.

In this experimental play--preceded by an original essay about its creative process--bits and pieces of a family's realities unfold in a non-linear simultaneity that reflects, with captivating irony, the difficulties encountered when language is expected to facilitate communication.

Ravage of Life is a challenging invitation to eviscerate literature and conceive a space where words find their body, freeing poetic expression from grammatical constraints, logic, and structure in order to embrace the limitlessness of living thought.