Aleksandar Saša Dundjerović. The Theatricality of Robert Lepage

Abstract

ALEKSANDAR SASA DUNDJEROVIC The Theatricality of Robert Lepage' Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007, 252pp. In September 2008, Montreal playwright, actor, and director Wajdi Mouawad staged his solo show, Seuls, at the Theatre d'Aujourd'hui. The play centred around Harwan, a doctoral candidate at a mythical Montreal university writing his dissertation on Robert In one to remind Lepage's agent of precisely which doctoral candidate writing on Robert Lepage he is, Harwan tells her he's writing on le cadre comme espace identitaire dans les solos de Robert Lepage. This comic moment, recognized as such by the Espace Go audience, signals not only the widespread interest in Lepage, his work, and his creative process by doctoral candidates and other kinds of academics--an interest evidenced in, for instance, the recent amply illustrated Ex Machina. Chantiers d'ecriture scenique from L'Instant scene (2007) and Ludovic Fouquet's Robert Lepage, l'horizon en images (2006). It also points to the many different ways such a multi-generic, multimedia, multilinguistic body of work might be approached. Already Lepage's theatrical productions have been examined through the lenses of sociological and postcolonial critique, of semiotics, and of intermedial performance in both French and English. Aleksandar Dundjerovic, a director and senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, whose book is derived from his own doctoral dissertation, takes a hagiographic approach. He attempts to isolate what he calls the theatricality of Lepage's work, a term which to mean style or aesthetic as tied to his creative process developed from the Repere cycles. Its key features are a transformative mise en scene, its inclusion of multiple media, and its open-ended creative process (25-6). He to attribute Lepage's international success and cross-cultural communication to this open form (4). I say seems as Dundjerovic describes the work and makes observations, but does not offer sustained analysis of, nor make any original claims about, Lepage's work, except to say that it is important and good. This makes it a sometimes confusing and, to me anyway, unfulfilling read. Like the French-language publications immediately preceding this one, Dundjerovic illuminates Lepage's creative process and his artistic preoccupations. Most chapters use a particular production as anchor for Dundjerovic's reflections on stages of Lepage's creative process; they admirably cover each of Lepage's live performance genres (solo, collective, text-based, opera) and reach from his first school tours in the late 1970s to Zulu Time in the early 2000s. Thus, La trilogie des dragons (1985-91) serves as an exemplary use of resources, the first stage of the Repere cycles Lepage developed out of his study and work with Jacques Lessard in the early 1980s. Indicative of his hagiographic approach, Dundjerovic's first chapter establishes Personal and Cultural Contexts, where a reductive view of Quebec's cultural politics is established in order to position Lepage as exceptional to his environment. …