The Lepage Project

The French-Canadian director talks fairy tales, Freud and Philadelphia.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Jun 10, 2009

interview

City Paper: What makes you tackle the projects you do on your own as opposed to, say, the collaborations that you've done — Cirque's KA, Peter Gabriel's Secret World, stage directing the Metropolitan Opera's La Damnation de Faust?

Robert Lepage: I've come to a point where I do a lot of solo work for all sorts of reasons, but originally my intention behind most of my work is the idea of collaboration, the idea of exchange, the idea of "hiding" behind a group of collaborators. I think that if there's a message you want to send to the world, or an image, or an example you want to set for the world, it's that you want to show collaboration. ... I like cross-breeding, I like the idea of having artists from different disciplines come together. That's my interest. I learn more about theater when I work with dance people or musicians or painters or video artists, etc. So I'm much more attracted to that than to writers, actually real playwrights. I think there's a lot of good directors around who are better at that than I am, so I leave that kind of collaboration to them. That's why I'm so interested when I'm offered work in the circus or, like in the case of Peter Gabriel, a rock concert. The whole idea of telling stories or creating shows and evenings with these people forces me to change my way of seeing the way we tell and convey stories in the theater. So those disciplines, those people from other walks of life, often have a very, very big impact on what I do, and I'm always searching for a common ground, a common vocabulary.

CP: After having performed in The Andersen Project for so many shows, why have you chosen to cede the lead to another?

RL: I try to perform in [my own shows] as long as I can until I feel that somebody has to step in to bring it further forward or in another direction. In this case, it's Yves Jacques, who does it in a wonderful way. But I've also had other replacements. Right now I'm performing in a show called The Blue Dragon here in Montreal, and I've been touring it for about a year. And in San Francisco, another actor is going to take Blue Dragon over, and he is going to bring a radically different energy to it. Usually my replacements don't try to impersonate me, but they try to imitate me — at first it's a natural reflex [to] try to do exactly what I used to do. But I try to encourage them to go in a different direction, to go some way that's closer to them. I ask them to come and undo what we've been doing in a certain way. ... Eventually they do their own thing and that's how the piece enriches itself, and becomes thicker with meaning and with poetry.

I don't want to be crass about it, [but] there is a practical side to it, which is that after a while, I need to move on to something else. A lot of my work is informed by other work that I do. It's important for me to have enough time to continue to do opera work, to continue to work with rock musicians, to continue to do circus and to start new fires, mainly new creations with other artists. So there comes a point where the shows have to continue their touring life without me, because I am busy doing other stuff.

CP: I normally wouldn't ask a question with such parochial/localized intent, but what made you want to bring Andersen to Philadelphia as opposed to New York City? Had you been to Philadelphia and found something in the space, the ambience, the water?

RL: There's something very refined and sophisticated about Philadelphia. When you perform in cities like Boston or Philadelphia, the audiences, the people come to the theater for radically different reasons obviously. New York is a bit of a big market. We enjoy performing in New York City but it's always more in a kind of a festival. We're playing the Nextel festival, or at BAM, or we once performed even at the New York City Puppet Festival. There's something about performing in New York City where you get an international audience. But I think there's some kind of sophistication when we play in places like Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia where you have real theater-goers, local theater-goers who have a very specific culture. And of course our relationship with the audience is a bit different, and the relationship after the show and the feedback that we get is very, very different. When you're playing big theater festivals in New York City or contexts where you're caught up with foreign producers or distributors or people who have venues, you end up not having a New York experience because you spend much more time with people coming from Moscow and London than you have with an American audience. And I think you get that experience more when you play in places like Cambridge or in Philadelphia or even Baltimore or Washington.

CP: What should I know about you by the end of Andersen Project?

RL: You know, a character like Hans Christian Andersen is a very, very complex character, and he wrote so many tales, and so much could be said about him. When somebody asks of another artist to talk about an artist like Andersen he will naturally select things that touch him more and that are closer to his ... provocations. And of course for me, there's always been a theme in my life which has had to do with the idea of being isolated or the idea of solitude, and that's probably why I ended up doing a lot of solo shows. So it is a very touching story and a very moving story, and I relate a lot to that sense of isolation and sense of solitude for a process of personal reasons that I don't honestly want to get into. Even though what I do tends to draw audiences or is very popular, there is this sense of isolation or sense of having the impression of not being understood or well perceived, and that's the main aspect that I could read from doing my research on the life of Andersen.

CP: A question about Far Side of the Moon — which happened to be distributed by a Philadelphia-based film company, TLA. In the film you direct, you play a lonely, middle-aged man videotaping the things that mean the most to him for the benefit of possible traveling aliens and how gravity affects the soul. Why do I feel as if there's so much of this film in the intimate spirit of Andersen?

RL: To do Andersen is a natural segue for me from doing Far Side. Because Far Side was also about this feeling of solitude, of being isolated, of not being understood, or not being invited to be part of what we call normality. So it's a different way of developing the subject matter, but it certainly is a close cousin to Andersen. Because Andersen is set in France, because the characters I perform are wackier, because they're more colorful, because they're more inspired by fairy tales than they are from real life, the language is very different. The visual language and also the style of acting is very different. In Far Side, it's much more autobiographical, much closer to my personal life, but also very, very close to my personal culture. And the dichotomy of certain subject matters, certainly the familial reconciliation, which I think is a very important theme, not just on a small scale, the reconciliation of these two brothers, but also on a very large scale, because the film and the play that it is inspired from is mainly about trying to reconcile parts of the world and trying to reconcile everyday life with larger-than-life problems.

CP: How did you craft such a human tale within the immense portent of sorrow and within the scale/immensity of the production?

RL: I think the important thing for me was to present an Andersen for adults, in the sense that Andersen wanted to be recognized as a mature writer, and he wrote a lot of very extraordinary tales that are much more interesting than the usual Ugly Ducklings — not that those tales are not of any importance, but there's always the usual suspects, there's always like 10 or 12 fairy tales that we remember from Andersen, but we remember them because we heard them a lot when we were kids or we read them to our children nowadays. But the second part of his life was much more preoccupied with more Freudian themes and darker themes like the shadow or the Dryad. I would say that they are tales for adults, even though he did adhere to the fairy tale style or vocabulary that he used. he was a very mature thinker but he's never been recognized as such and he struggled with that a lot. And for me, that was the Andersen I wanted to show. ... He was a very avant garde writer because he wrote all about the id and the subconscious and that way of seeing human nature way before the Freuds and the Jungs and the Vienna school of thought.

CP: So what makes the English furious and the French delirious, as you say within the Project?

RL: There is a huge divide still today between the French and the English, even though the new Europe and the new tunnel, the Chunnel, actually is supposed to close that gap, but it's not true. There's something that comes with language. You speak the way you think. I think the English language is organized in the way the English brain, or the Anglophone brain, is structured, and the French/Latin languages are structured in a different manner. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but the two of them actually don't necessarily fit together. And for me, coming from a culture that is heavily influenced by American culture, and of course being a subject of the British empire, but at the same time being a Francophone, I live with that paradox every day and I found it important to convey that in this piece. There is a very fundamental thing that people in theater should know is that the English people say "an audience" to describe the public, so that means that you invite people to come and hear something. The French, or the Latin languages in general, say "spectator," which means that the French invite the public to come and see something, see a story. So from the start there's a very different perception of what the public's experience should be.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

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