Robert Lepage's original stage productions

Making theatre global

Karen Fricker

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526115850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Künstlermonographien

This book explores the development of Robert Lepage's distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984-1994) and middle (1995-2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect on shaping his aesthetic and his professional trajectory. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception.
Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage's productions. Productions discussed include The Dragon's Trilogy, Needles and Opium, and The Far Side of the Moon.
Making theatre global: Robert Lepage's original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the early 21st century.

1

Local, global, universal? The Dragon’s Trilogy

Québec is multiple, it is in the global village, and not just in the francophonie. It has to be part of the world! My nationalist act is to make theatre here and abroad, with my roots and my languages, my history. (qtd in Lévesque ‘Archange’)ⁱ

Robert Lepage made this statement in 1992, less than a decade after his international reputation was launched with the touring success of the epic group production La Trilogie des dragons/The Dragon’s Trilogy and the solo show Vinci. While affirming the central place of his own culture to his artistic practice, he makes clear that his vision for his career involves working abroad as well as in Québec, and underlines that working internationally will have positive effects not just for him but for his nation. In affirming a dialectical relationship between the local and global in his creative practice, Lepage echoes one of the earliest and most influential social science definitions of globalisation, by Anthony Giddens: ‘the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distinct localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (64).¹ Crucially, as David Held and Anthony McGrew argue, the pole of the local does not drop away under the conditions of globalisation; rather, ‘the local becomes embedded within more expansive sets of interregional relations and networks of power’ (3). As John Tomlinson points out, however, the general account of the effects of globalisation on local cultural identities has been highly ‘pessimistic’:

Globalisation, so the story goes, has swept like a flood tide through the world’s diverse cultures, destroying stable localities, displacing peoples, bringing a market-driven, ‘branded’ homogenisation of cultural experience, thus obliterating the differences between locality-defined cultures which had constituted our identities. (‘Globalisation and Cultural Identity’ 269)

Following Manuel Castells, Tomlinson proffers a counter-narrative: that, rather than being razed down by globalisation, localities have responded by asserting their cultural identities; thus local identities have been produced by globalisation, rather than destroyed by it, though this local resistance can often be ‘multi-form, disorganised, and sometimes politically reactionary’ (270). It is therefore useful to think of the relationship between local and globalised cultural identities as dialogic: ‘a matter of the interplay of an institutional–technological impetus towards globality with counterpoised “localised” forces’ (ibid., emphasis in original).

Québec stands as evidence of this understanding of the processes of globalisation being productive of cultural identity, and of cultural identity as an ongoing dialogue between local and globalising forces. A nationalist movement emerged in Québec in the 1960s, concurrent with the rise of nationalism in Anglo-Canada and some African and Caribbean countries, and with the early swell of economic, technological, and cultural aspects of late-capitalist globalisation that would coalesce in the 1980s and 1990s. While using the language of colonisation to refer to Québec is contentious, for reasons which I will go on to explore, it is my assertion that the interplay between nationalism, decolonisation, and globalisation shaped Québec’s political, economic, and cultural life from the 1960s forward. Internationalism, always an important part of the Québec national project, became a particular focus of its cultural production and cultural affairs in the mid-1980s as the project for political sovereignty lulled, and other avenues for national promotion took the spotlight. As a gifted, restless artist with a particular interest in travel and cultures foreign to him, Lepage emerged at the perfect time to benefit from and feed this move towards internationalisation in Québec culture, and his career provides a revealing case study of the complexities of the negotiation of the relationship between the local and the global.

In this chapter I explore these complexities via a close examination of The Dragon’s Trilogy, the show that helped to jump-start Lepage’s international career. Patrick Lonergan has argued that a key characteristic of globalised theatre is its capacity to be received reflexively; that is, it allows its audience ‘to relate the action to their own preoccupations and interests, as those preoccupations and interests are determined locally’ (87). This discussion of The Dragon’s Trilogy allows us to nuance Lonergan’s formulation and begin to identify a characteristic aspect of Lepage’s work – the juxtaposition of culturally specific material with material to which a broad spectrum of audience members can relate reflexively.² The Dragon’s Trilogy and its reception are reflective not just of Québec’s internationalism in the 1980s but of another concern then at the foreground of national discourses: the negotiation of cultural diversity, as Québec attempted to balance the ongoing quest for national self-articulation with the presence of migrants from various linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, and with its existing Anglophone and Indigenous populations. The production reflected this in its story of an extended Francophone Québécois family’s encounters with immigrants to Canada and its movement across the country and eventually abroad, a tale that spanned most of the twentieth century.

The Dragon’s Trilogy is a transitional piece in Lepage’s career, in that it was made to be performed in Québec and Canada; its further international success was unexpected.³ Thus it was Lepage’s first piece of theatre to become globalised, in terms of circulation and reception; and differences in the ways the piece was understood in local, Canadian, and international markets are striking. Domestically, the piece was read and celebrated as an allegory of Québec’s national self-realisation and opening up to difference, and as reflective of newly international understandings of national identity in the 1980s. In international markets, and even in Canadian ones, by contrast, the extent to which it was a self-portrait – and self-critique – of evolving Québécois national identity was hardly legible. Rather, what were praised consistently about the production were the innovative aspects of Lepage’s stagecraft, which gave the impression of moments from the past overlapping with the present and of distant lives connecting. These effects had a powerful impact on privileged international audiences because they simulate and echo some of the experience of globalisation. This capacity to deliver feeling-global affects has become one of the keys to Lepage’s international success, but it carries risks of sacrificing specific meanings for universal ones, and of potential misunderstanding when these powerful affects are delivered via culturally specific material. We see this in the differing responses to The Dragon’s Trilogy’s depiction of early twentieth-century Québec as a racist place, ‘stamped with xenophobia’ (Camerlain 87):ⁱⁱ while understood locally as self-critical, commentators outside the province in some cases lacked the context in which to interpret this representation as critique. This chapter offers a reading of The Dragon’s Trilogy as the articulation of a rapidly decolonising and globalising culture. I dwell at some length on the Québec context because, as his career has progressed, study of Lepage’s work has focused on the meanings it makes in international locations. What has been less explored is the extent to which some of his work has been appreciated locally – indeed, in the case of The Dragon’s Trilogy, revered – for its capacity to capture and reflect the national zeitgeist, and to offer grounded socio-cultural critique.

Québec, nationalism, globalisation⁴

France was the first settler nation of Canada, and a distinct French-Canadian culture developed in eastern Canada from the seventeenth century. In the Treaty of Paris in 1763, following the Seven Years’ War, France relinquished any claim on Canadian lands and Britain became the official ruler of Canada, but tolerantly allowed French to remain the official language and Catholicism the official religion of the area Québec now occupies. The 1841 British Act of Union bringing together Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Québec) was opposed by many in the latter region, creating a growing solidarity among French Canadians. The Catholic Church took a leadership role in Lower Canada, facilitating the development of what is widely understood to have been a highly religious, conservative, rural, anti-statist, and somewhat xenophobic culture.⁵ In the mid-twentieth century Québec became increasingly modernised and secularised, in part due to the leadership of Premier Maurice Duplessis, who held office from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959. While Duplessis was conservative and isolationist (his time in office is known as la grande noirceur – the great darkness), the strength of his leadership had the effect of loosening the hold of the Catholic Church over education, public services, and the worldview of the Québécois people. The introduction of television in Québec and Canada in 1952 also played its part.⁶ University-based intellectuals began to question the ‘clericalism, conservatism, and insularism of Québec society’, while the urban working class started to exhibit scepticism about the limitations of traditional Québec values (Dickinson and Young 297). The death of Duplessis in 1959 and the subsequent election of Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party to provincial leadership in 1960 galvanised these growing dissidences into the decade of nation-building activity called the Quiet Revolution. In order for the Québécois to become maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house), Lesage advocated the continuing empowerment of the Québec state so that it could take control of its economic, political, and cultural affairs.

These internal factors worked together with external ones in triggering Québec’s national consolidation. An important early outside stimulus was the emergence of Anglo-Canadian nationalism in the face of the increasing economic and cultural domination of North America by the United States. Following on from the publication of the federal Massey Report in 1951, which recommended sweeping cultural reforms to assure Canada’s continuing development as a country with a strong and independent identity, Québec set up its own Royal Commission of Inquiry into Constitutional Problems, known as the Tremblay Commission, in 1953. The report that resulted was a dense and somewhat contradictory document that at once re-endorsed traditional Catholic values and called for modernisation. Another element of the Tremblay Report was the definition of culture in a Québec context as national culture, which was ‘taken as an absolute value’ (Handler 91). As its most obvious distinguishing characteristic, the French language became, for nationalists, the primary signifier of Québec identity, and ensuring that French would continue to be the legal language of the province became a focus of the nationalist movement. Artists and writers played a key role in the creation of strong national feeling during the Quiet Revolution. Through their work, novelists (Herbert Aquin, Jacques Godbout), chansonniers (Felix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault), essayists (Pierre Vallières), and playwrights (Michel Tremblay) – all working in French – described or argued for the vibrant existence of a unique and valuable culture where, it had long been asserted, none existed.

Another factor contributing to the Québec nationalist movement was ‘an influx of “third language” migrants anxious, in a globalised world, to learn the lingua anglia’ (Waters 194). Canada and Québec were the recipients of many immigrants in the immediate post-war years and, while immigration slowed in the 1960s and 1970s (Dickinson and Young 310–12), the presence of new populations became a central concern of official Québec, as new arrivals tended to assimilate into Anglophone culture. In response, Québec created a Ministry of Immigration in 1968, whose budget was to grow from $2.8 million to $20 million over the next ten years and which worked to assimilate immigrants through programmes of ‘language acquisition and cultural adaptation’ (Gagnon and Iacovino 374). While the other Canadian provinces have since developed their own immigration policies, Québec remains the province with the most control over selecting and educating its immigrants. Assuring that French remains the only official language of the province and the language of common usage has been one of the most controversial aspects of Québec government policy. The Charter of the French Language or Bill 101, which the sovereigntist Parti Québécois enacted a year after it took power in 1976, requires immigrants to send their children to French-language schools, businesses with more than fifty employees to be run in French, and commercial signs to be in French. Many Anglophones saw the Bill as a hindrance to their liberties and left the province after it was passed, but it has remained policy ever since and is regarded by many to have played a central role in keeping French the majority language in Québec.⁷

Internationalism figured centrally in the development and promotion of a Québécois political, economic, social, and cultural sphere distinct from the rest of Canada. Québec’s leaders initially built on its relationships with the United States, France, and the Francophonie, and developed a sophisticated para-diplomatic network to promote Québec’s political interests, trading relationships, and cultural dissemination worldwide.⁸ Interaction with established nations, it was believed, would enhance the legitimacy of Québec’s own image (Keating 125). The success of this has been striking: Québec has become ‘one of the most politically powerful subnational units of government in the world’, according to political scientist Jody Neathery-Castro and sociologist Mark Rousseau (464). Québec played a primary role in promoting both the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (1989) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994), and was the only Canadian province to vote in favour of NAFTA. This support of NAFTA revealed ‘a very practical duality’ in the cultural identity of a younger generation of Québécois at the time NAFTA was signed, according to James Csipak and Lise Héroux: ‘[O]n the one hand, economic liberalism is perceived in a very positive ...