New Play HELD TOGETHER Will Celebrate The 200th Anniversary Of The Lachine Canal

Tableau D'Hôte Theatre has announced that its multidisciplinary heritage project, Échos du canal, is one of five initiatives selected by Parks Canada to commemorate the bicentennial of the Lachine Canal. The year-long project launches with a powerful one-woman show Held together on May 31 and June 1st, presented on the banks of the canal itself, just east of the Charlevoix bridge, on the south side (Pointe-Saint-Charles).

Held Together features the canal as a living, breathing storyteller — preparing herself for her 200th birthday while reflecting on two centuries of industry, resilience, and change. Combining poetry, humour, and grit, the show offers a bold reimagining of what it means to commemorate a site shaped as much by human ambition as by collective memory.

“The Lachine Canal is more than just a waterway — it's a witness,” says Mathieu Murphy-Perron, Artistic Director of Tableau D'Hôte Theatre and creator of the project. “We wanted to honour the voices that have passed through this artery — the workers, the dreamers, the fighters — and ask who still gets heard today.”

Veteran performer Deena Aziz brings the canal to life in Held Together. Aziz has worked across Canada, in the US, and internationally for over 30 years. Her stage credits include Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre, Alberta Theatre Projects, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, the Stratford Festival, Canadian Stage, GCTC, Geordie Productions, Imago, Repercussion, and Tableau D'Hôte Theatre.

This new work builds on Tableau D'Hôte's ongoing commitment to landscape theatre. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, the company launched En Pointe, a series of bilingual street plays staged across Pointe-Saint-Charles. In 2022, Voyage invited audiences into boats for an immersive nine-kilometre performance along the Lachine Canal, with artists animating the banks through music, dance, and storytelling. Like Held Together, these projects sought to collapse the boundary between setting and story.

Opened in 1825, the Lachine Canal was built to bypass the treacherous Lachine Rapids and played a pivotal role in establishing Montréal as an industrial hub. For over a century, it served as a vital trade route and powered the factories that drove Canadian industrialization. After its closure to commercial navigation in 1970, the canal entered a long period of decline before being reimagined as a recreational and heritage space. Today, it remains a symbol of transformation — and tension — between past and present.

Échos du canal will continue through the summer, fall and winter with a series of public interventions, floating performances, and art activations, inviting communities to engage with the canal's layered legacy.

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