Abstract
Robert Lepage is one of the most acclaimed directors of contemporary theatre. His concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space (in Elsinore, Les Aiguilles et l’Opium, and The Ring), resembles Gordon Craig’s idea of using neutral, mobile, non-representational screens as a staging device. Lepage’s theatre is characterised by the scenographic machine, in the double meaning of actor and dispositive (that is, an agent effecting a disposition). Within this, involving video and a continuous metamorphosis of the scene, the actor is an essential mechanism. The scene integrates images and mechanisms of movement of the set in a single theatrical device in which man is still at the centre of the universe, as in the Renaissance; theatre, in a multimedia perspective, can thus revert to being a laboratory of integral culture, where art and technology rediscover their common etymology (tekné). I analyse two examples of his productions: Elsinore (1995) where a single actor impersonates all the characters of the tragedy, thanks to a metamorphic and mobile scenic solution and video projections, and The Ring cycle (2014–2016), where the set is a high-tech huge machine designed for the entire tetralogy, a work of mechanical engineering, rotating, bending and transforming into different shapes.
Highlights
The Canadian-born Robert Lepage is one of the most acclaimed directors and interpreters of contemporary theatre
I too am convinced that the theme of metamorphosis is the core issue of Lepage’s theatrical work: this develops around the plot, the life, and the interiority of the characters – which are in part the reflection of the author’s life given back in a form of auto-fiction, a storytelling between autobiography and fiction – (Monteverdi 2018: 171)
What best identifies the work of Lepage is that of the machine, in the dual meaning of scenographic apparatus and actor: the scene integrates images and mechanics in a single theatrical device in which the actor is a crucial cog
Summary
In his extensive use of technology, both physical and electronic, has on several occasions underlined how its evolution has changed his way of telling stories in theatre. I conclude by inferring from my examples and discussion, a position that eschews any unnecessary opposition between the presence of a machine as a craft attribute that is dependent on the human and moved by him/her (the mechané), or completely autonomous from him/her and which eliminates the human presence (a computer system), and that minimises the distinction between a bulky, imposing machine, and simple and discrete one, whether archaic, or modern, possessing innovative attributes On the contrary, it is a question of defining what this presence brings into the stage in terms of relationships (spatial, dramaturgical, social).
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