PAIGE FRANCOEUR
Paige Francoeur is a self-described theatre rat who grew up in Saskatoon. They are a queer, multi-disciplinary storyteller who looks to amplify voice of marginalized folks in their work. Francoeur joined Monday Dearest over Zoom in March 2025 to discuss how she plans to push boundaries as both an artist, being a Sagittarius and how she handles redirection.
Levesque: Would you ever like to expand into other creative scenes beyond theater?
Francoeur: Absolutely. I do consider myself multidisciplinary just because even within the world of theater I think prairie artists in particular are very, very scrappy in a way that we kind of have to do everything. Especially in a medium like theater, it’s very hard to just do one thing. I think you have to be able to produce and write and perform and do all these kinds of things to just make things happen. So as far as other forms of art, I’m really interested in learning more of them and pulling more of them into my practice in the future. I’ve been kind of looking at grad schools actually and I’ve been trying to find something that has interdisciplinary art forms because I feel like school gets more specialized the longer you go through it and I’m like, “No, I want to expand the different art scenes because the visual arts are so cool.”. It’s like taking other things and applying them to my medium is what I hope to do, but it’s hard to do in the wild, you kind of just have to start doing stuff.
Leveque: Are there a set of words you’d use to describe yourself?
Francoeur: Esoteric is probably one of them. I’d say whimsical, it’s a fun one. And I guess it’s not really an adjective but I always describe myself as a wallflower to people because I am better one on one, I’m very shy. I think people sometimes think if you’re an artist that means that you have to be out, especially with a public facing job. It’s like being “on” when you’re at work and then not doing it at home and stuff. I don’t know if that’s a good enough adjective but that’s definitely how I usually describe myself. I’m a bit reserved in that way but curious would be a good word too. I think that most great art is born out of curiosity and I think it’s the way that any artist in any form, to me, stays curious about things and just finds things to really get into. It’s the way to keep going, you know?
Levesque: Yeah just continuously learning and expanding.
Francoeur: Yeah and whatever that weird thing is that makes me go, “I want to look into that and know more about that,” is often the basis for people’s projects or some people’s entire creative practice right? One of my favourite things to do is that when there’s artists I really really really like I look at all their work and there’s recurring themes and recurring images that start to emerge. And it’s weird developing my own practice. I still fully consider myself an emerging artist, but it’s interesting working on developing your own practice and seeing things start to emerge and you’re like, “Oh this is where I’m at in my career and my life right now; these are my themes…” And that’s just born out of what really speaks to you and what you’re curious about or what problems keep turning over in your brain that you want to solve.
Levesque: You identify as someone who wants to take creative risks or risks in general with your work. Do you think you take risks in your personal life?
Francoeur: You know, that’s the thing, I think I’m a total homebody. I would say in my personal life, I’m not really much of a risk taker or anything like that. To me, art is the place where I’m interested in really pushing the envelope and that’s where that fire side of me gets activated and I’m not afraid to pop off. But the rest of me is fully like, “Okay I just want to stay home and play on my switch with my cat.”.
Levesque: You’re a Sagittarius right?
Francoeur: Yes. I love all that stuff, I’m a big fire sign. I always love other people that I meet that are fire signs, it’s just been a pattern. So I’m always like, “Yes! Fire sign energy!” But also most of my good friends are heavy, heavy water signs. So the thing is that sometimes they’re like, “Whoa, whoa,” because I can get weirdly intense, I’m just an intense guy. It's an acquired taste.
Levesque: It’s awesome. Sometimes people struggle to identify their sense of self in interviews, but you have a strong approach. It helps me to understand how you feel about yourself.
Francoeur: Thank you. I think one of the hardest things to do in life, but specifically as an artist, is to have a sense of where you’re at and where you want to go so that you’re constantly evolving and going forward. It’s easy to plateau in any area of life but especially as an artist if you get comfortable and you’re like, “This what I do, I’m gonna stick with this.” I think you have to be looking to push boundaries if you want to keep evolving and accomplish anything really.
Levesque: Do you remember the last time you pushed those boundaries with a project?
Francoeur: Oh my goodness, yes I would say a lot of the work that I do is about realigning people’s expectations. My brain is very surreal and I kind of like to work in that mode, I’m not really aligned with realism. As a theater creator, as a writer, what I want to do is take images or things from my brain that I don’t really have words for and transform it into a more visual way for people to see and understand. A lot of the writing I’ve been doing lately has to particularly do with mental illness and the representation of these things. It’s a subject that is near and dear to me. It’s the idea of being able to take things that are intangible and make them tangible through art that’s not just a conversation… Dreams really shape me and affect me as an artist and as the person I am. So a lot of my world feels like when you try to describe a dream to somebody and you can’t even begin to explain but it’s so vivid in your brain. A lot of life for me has felt like trying to describe a dream to someone. I think I’ve gone through a lot of times feeling like I was unable to articulate myself or unable to be understood. And I think that sometimes things defy words or a simple explanation, so I think art has always been the closest thing you can do to represent how you feel or instill that feeling in other people.
Levesque: How would this apply in the context of public speaking?
Francoeur: I think people think I love public speaking or that I’ll be good at it because I’m an actor and I hate speaking as myself. I feel to me, the way I approach something, particularly acting, is that I’m just a puzzle piece that fits into the puzzle to try to make things work and so I can fearlessly do that [when acting] and when I’m here accomplishing my goal for the greater good. But it comes down to it, I don’t want people to look at me… If it’s a subject I’m super passionate about, you can put me up in front of people and I’ll be able to talk about it because I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m interested in this,” but I don’t like being perceived that much, I kind of like being a shadowy figure. And actually, that’s one of the things I love most about theater as a medium, it is intangible in a way that no matter how much a show resonantes with you or a theater performance, what’s left of it is kind of like a ghost in your brain afterwards. You maybe have a few images that really solidify but I think, more than anything, you’re left with the feelings that it captured for you, or how you felt, or how you responded to things in a way. Like with film you can just pause something and play it back and locate that exact moment. I like the imagination of being a more spectral figure, you can’t actually conjure that back up again, you can just remember how it impacted you…
Levesque: Is there a way that you as an artist deal with rejection and redirection?
Francoeur: I mean, this is definitely a topic that I think about a lot. Vulnerability is really something that I think is essential to be an artist. And it’s one of the hardest things, like people don’t like being vulnerable, obviously, and I think as an artist you get used to just kind of feeling of being, I don’t know, chewed up and spit out and you just kind of have to. So I think obviously you know with years and time and practice and the more things you get rejected from, you’re eventually just like, “Alright, this doesn’t bother me.”. This past year I started a weird little project because I wanted to get back into journaling because I used to do a lot of collage art and bullet journaling and in the past years I’ve fallen off of that. So I wanted to bring it back and I started doing this thing that I call my Museum of Failure where after every audition or things I’ve tried out for or things I’ve applied for that I don't get into, I take a screenshot of the email or letter or whatever it is and I print it out and I put it in a little frame and then I write about it and reflect because sometimes, you know, it sucks in that moment but it’s really funny to read back and be like, “I totally thought I had this and I didn’t.”. I’ve been doing that to find the irony and humor in it but then also be able to have a place to reflect on stuff. I’m hoping one day I’ll be able to go back and be like, “Oh my gosh this is all the stuff I had to do to get here.”.
Levesque: Do you think that it helps you appreciate the wins more?
Francoeur: I think so. I think I need to get better about celebrating wins though too. I’ve been meaning to make a page at the back of the [Museum of Failure] of the things that actually work out. Because I think in our lives we tend to try and project the things that obviously people see work out or whatever and more privately reflect on the things that didn’t work out for you. But I think that it’s important to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose, because as an artist it’s just constant rejection and it can be very personal as well too, art is personal in a way… It’s an entirely different feeling when you feel like you have to put yourself out there and people aren’t rocking with it for whatever reason. That’s a thing that I don’t know if you ever 100% get over…
Levesque: A project you’re working on would be “Twilight State”?
Francoeur: Yes so that's a play in progress that I desperately need to get on and do another draft. I’m in a weird place right now where it’s not osmosis but the opposite, like cells dividing into all these different things. But it was born out of all these questions in my life and exploring queerness and mental illness through a Saskatchewan Gothic lens in particular. I think that the prairies have a very particular gothic sensibility that I’m very interested in and I think it blends well with horror and those kinds of genres that I feel I naturally lean into anyway… Right now it’s all kinds of things. I don’t know if it’s going to be a one person play or a three person play. Right now it’s kind of like a really long poem that I need to slice and dice and completely refigure.
Levesque: I think art is confusing not just to the viewers but to the creators.
Francoeur: I think that’s the thing with a lot of work. As an actor or when you’re working on a project, it’s an already built-in thing, especially if it’s been done a million times, like you’re working on a thing that people know and recognize. You’re analyzing it and turning it over and trying to find something new, but at the same time there’s a path laid out for you. What excites me about new work, especially as a writer, is that it’s not there but it’s also a terrifying thing to be like, “I don’t know what this wants to be yet.”. I want to let intuition and other things guide that but it doesn’t really lay out a straightforward path for you. And so I think that the elements that make up what the play was I created during the incubation process, like when we talk about a theme across your whole practice and there’s this material that I’m kind of nibbling at that’s coming through in all these different forms.
Levesque: Growing up in the prairies, you have to develop a specific skill set to approach things, from the weather to the creative scene. I definitely find that prairie artists, like you said earlier in the sense that they’re scrappy, have to make their own opportunities.
Francoeur: Absolutely. I think everyone growing up for the most part experiences the, “Oh I hate this place, I want to do something big. I want to go to the big city.” But I find the older I get, the more I’ve developed this stubborn love for the prairies. And as much as I’m frustrated with things that happen either politically or culturally, at the end of the day there’s a love I have for the authenticity and how unique our little prairie culture is. And again, there’s so many incredible, amazing folks that live out here and there’s really cool things going on. And I think we get underestimated sometimes because we’re always looking to the bigger places where there’s more going on but I do think that Saskatchewan and the prairies in general have so much to offer in a way that I don’t think is fully explored as much.
Levesque: You have a tattoo of a moth inspired by The Lesson of the Moth by Don Marquis. There’s a stanza in the poem that says, “it’s better to be a part of beauty for one instant than to cease to exist forever”. How do you relate to that?
Francoeur: I love that poem. It’s my favourite poem because I think it was the first time I saw something articulated to how I’ve always felt about life. To me, the thing that has been most important to me my entire life has been the stories that shaped me and have become a part of me. Whether that’s my favourite books or movies or video games or all the things I had growing up, those were the most important things to me in the world and my goal in life is to be able to create something that maybe doesn’t have that exact level of impact on somebody else but is still able to share that with another person. And I think that poem is a really good representation of how you have to go for it.
Levesque: What is the process like of leaving a project?
Francoeur: You know I used to take it really really hard every time I finished a project. When I was in high school, you know, you work so hard on a project and you cry for days and days [when it’s over]. I personally find with theater and live performance, the rooms you create are things kind of incredible, magical places and that the permutation of those people in that room doing that thing, it will never happen again in the same way. I love the impermanence of it, but it can also make it really difficult to finish a project… I think that’s what makes theater special for audiences but I think it’s something that you have to get used to, like rejection. I think you have to get used to letting things go even when you put so much time and effort into them knowing that you have to trust the impact that it’s going to have on people and that you can’t really capture it more than it is in that sense.
Levesque: Did theatre teach you how to take chances?
Francoeur: I think since the day I was born there was going to be some kind of art. When I was really little it was writing, I drew a lot in elementary school. It was always [art] in different forms. I think it was always going to be some form of storytelling because that’s what’s most important to me. And I think the rawness of theater, like I discussed, is kind of ethereal presence it leaves you with is what really speaks to me about it. But part of why I’m interested in so many different mediums is because at the end of the day, it all comes back to storytelling and that being the thing that drives me. It’s like no matter what, I’m going to find a way to tell this story whether I’m doing it as a writer, as a performer or through a visual project.
Levesque: Is there another piece of art that speaks to you beside the moth poem?
Francoeur: David Lynch and all of his work because he wasn’t only a filmmaker but a visual artist, and he did music and sound design and all these multidisciplinary [forms]. There’s another poem that I do sometimes when I audition… it’s called ‘Warming Her Pearls’... It’s a queer poem from the perspective of a handmaid talking about how she’s basically in love with the lady she serves and how [the handmaid] gets to wear her pearls all day. So the [the pearls] are cold when they’re put on and so she takes them and warms them. And it’s about this shared intimacy between them and it really struck me in a way. A big focus for me is queer voices applied to classical works because as much as I think we’re encouraged to be like, “Oh make new stuff and move in this direction,” I think that proving not only queer folks, but all marginalized folks exist and we always have. That’s a very important thing that I like to excavate in art, especially because I’m so interested in things like Shakespeare or classical works where historically we’ve erased the perspectives of all but very certain people. And I think that it’s one thing to invent it new, but excavating and finding these perspectives as they were centuries ago is endlessly fascinating to me.
Levesque: Is there anything you’d like to go back on or elaborate more?
Francoeur: I think it’s interesting that people are always wanting you to take what you’ve created and put it back in words or simplify it for them. And it’s just so funny to me because the whole purpose of art is like an exorcism for me where I take parts of myself and it’s the best way I can show this to you, this is the most accurate way I can show this to you because I just can't explain it. And it’s so funny how people sometimes want to make you put that back into words… If I could then I wouldn’t have made this thing you know? I’m really fascinated with other people and [how they interpret]. I think societally, we’re taught that if you don’t understand something, it means you’re dumb or that it’s too smart for you or all these kinds of things. And I wish that I could encourage more people to just be more interpretive and be more comfortable living in that place of; “I don’t know what this means.”... I have a huge curiosity for the people who are willing to be like, “Yeah I don’t understand what that is but let’s talk about it.”.
By K. Levesque
