Renowned QuĂ©bĂ©cois director, actor and playwright Robert Lepage is among the most influential performance makers of our time. He first earned widespread acclaim with the international tours of his devised productions, including the ensemble piece The Dragonsâ Trilogy (1985), which uses innovative scenography to craft twentieth-century stories unfolding across three Canadian Chinatowns, and Needles and Opium (1991), a highly physical and visual solo show that interweaves the 1949 reverse pilgrimages of Jean Cocteau (to New York) and Miles Davis (to Paris) with a QuĂ©bĂ©cois artistâs quest to self-actualize in Europe. Lepage has collaborated with the largest theatrical producer in the world, Cirque du Soleil, creating Totem and the one-hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar Las Vegas production KĂ (Fink 2004). He is also the first North American director to stage a Shakespeare production at Londonâs National Theatreâ1992âs irreverent A Midsummer Nightâs Dream, which saw the playing space surrounded by a narrow pool and drenched in mud. A sought-after opera director whose work has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera and Londonâs Royal Opera House, Lepage has also made successful forays into filmmaking as a director and screenwriter (Le Confessional, Triptych). His global contributions to culture have been recognized through international awards ranging from the Europe Theatre Prize and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyâs Eugene McDermott Award to his admission into the Order of Canada and Franceâs Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. By extending his talents to re-envisioning extant opera and theatre texts, while continuing to produce devised productions that use evocative scenography to explore the complexities of personal and cultural crossings (such as The Far Side of the Moon, The Andersen Project and Lipsynch ), Lepage has secured a position among our eraâs foremost theatre innovators.
This study takes Lepageâs adaptations as its topic, examining the ways in which he employs scenography to reinvigorate and reconfigure existing works, such as Hector Berliozâs rarely produced opera The Damnation of Faust, which, as staged at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008, represented the opera houseâs first digitally interactive production. In the first scene, an elderly Faust appears in his library, lamenting his solitary existence. Faustâs isolation is underlined as a digitally projected wall of books is replaced by video footage featuring a grey sky populated by a flock of black birds. Worn by the performer playing Faust, motion sensors register shifts in the singerâs voice and body, enabling his pitch, pace and movement to dictate the birdsâ trajectory (Wakin 2008). As the music swells and Faustâs lament becomes particularly plaintive, the flock of birds expands and moves upwards, disappearing into the bleak sky; this interactive sequence mimics the singerâs dynamic and melodic trajectory, while also suggesting that Faust is desperate to escape his isolation. In a later scene, Lepage offers a counter-narrative to Berliozâs triumphant and celebratory âHungarian Marchâ. Warâs futility is emphasized as the female chorus membersâ musical tribute to their absent partners is accompanied by scenography representing death as a routine facet of battle. Portrayed from an aerial perspective, soldiers on cables repeatedly march into battle by walking vertically up the setâs back scrim, only to fall lifelessly into their loversâ laps after a series of gunshots are heard. Through this scenography, Lepageâs production goes against the text (and score) to counter conventional interpretations of this scene, thus re-âwritingâ an extant work by offering spectators an embodied and uncommon (albeit not unique) readingâthe heroics of war are easily superseded by the banality and anonymity of daily slaughter on the battlefield. As these and further examples will demonstrate, Robert Lepageâs scenic writing defines his affective adaptations, allowing him to visually adapt canonical texts and revive other lesser-known works through his distinctly twenty-first-century version of Ă©criture scĂ©nique, a process and product I have termed scenographic dramaturgy.
Scenography as Adaptation
My theorization of scenographic dramaturgy views scenographyâor the entire visual and physical world of a production, including performersâ embodied textsâas the means through which an extant text is adapted. I have identified three central tenets as the foundation for Lepageâs particular scenographic approach to adaptation: historical-spatial mapping, architectonic scenography and the kinetic text of collaborators.1 As Chap. 2 will demonstrate, historical-spatial mapping is the backbone of Lepageâs scenographic dramaturgy; it transcends the basics of setting and offers a detailed interpretive engagement with times and places, investing in the zeitgeist of a particular period and, often, overlaying one era with another to provide further contextualizing potentialities for spectators. Architectonic scenography refers to a dynamic stage space/set that shifts position, height, depth and/or composition to suggest tone and atmosphere. The kinetic text of collaborators indicates the physical scores crafted by performers who work alongside Lepage to incorporate their own signature embodied texts into his productions. Lepageâs collaborations with these artists hinge on a shared understanding of the body as an evocative site where meaning is sculpted, developed and unfolds. The ways in which collaborators contribute to the total visual world of a performance, including through gesture, movement style and various dance traditions, are considered here not only as they adapt an extant text but also as a barometer of an increasingly progressive interculturalism that can be witnessed in Lepageâs work. Questions of the acknowledgement of these contributions will further inform my argument as Lepage is often solely credited as the director/author of the extant text adaptations he undertakes. In short, although Lepageâs adaptations of extant texts sometimes favour or enhance conventional readingsâa form of adaptation Julie Sanders classifies as an amplificatory procedure (2006, 18)âhis unique contribution to contemporary theatre praxis resides in how he develops his directorial vision via these three tenets, chiefly historical-spatial mapping.
The term adaptation is central to this bookâs discussion of scenographic dramaturgyâs meaning-making potential and will be examined throughout upcoming chapters. Adaptation is viewed here as the broader category within which Lepageâs process of scenographic dramaturgy fitsâin other words, scenographic dramaturgy is a specific form of adaptation that Lepage uses to re-envision extant texts. Though adaptations are often defined by alterations to the dramatic text, mise en scĂšneâparticularly as crafted by auteur-directors such as Lepage, Simon McBurney and Elisabeth LeCompteâis increasingly being seen as an adaptive language and form of authorship in its own right, capable of reconfiguring canonical texts through non-logocentric means. As highlighted by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, adaptation occurs ânot only between verbal [dramatic] texts, but between intercultural bodies, lights, sounds, movements and all the other cultural elements at work in theatrical productionâ (2000, 7). Granted, all theatre productions are technically adaptations in that they adapt a dramatic work from page to stage; nonetheless, Lepageâs adaptations can be categorized as such because they go further, refashioning/remediating extant texts through his signature, auteur-ed performance text. This text, built on evocative interactions between bodies, stage space and scenography rather than shifts to the written play or opera libretto, acts as an additional form of authorship, existing in conversation (not competition or critique) with the source text.
My work also turns to the etymological root of the verb âadaptâ. Drawn from the French word adapter and its Latin counterpart, adaptare, adapt means âto fitâ (Oxford 2012). Lepageâs adaptations allow a text to evolve via the visual language of its adaptive period and the socio-political context within which it is produced. Though the script may remain the same, new material informs the production text, be it cutt...