Robert Lepage Inc. – Theatre for Festival Audiences

Abstract

There has been much debate in recent years in scholarship on Robert Lepage's theatre regarding his position as a local-turned-global performance-maker in post-capitalist and post-postmodern contexts. Lepage has been seen as an exponent of intercultural theatre, cultural tourism and the festival marketplace, and his work has been viewed as a form of international theatre transforming and developing performance through movement between different cultures. The themes in Lepage's devised performances are at the junction where global intercepts local, showing Québécois characters exposed to international contexts that change them. In his narratives Quebec as a local site is perceived in response to processes of globalisation. Lepage's style of festival touring theatre develops through cycles, using the audience as another partner in the collective process. Lepage is aware that his kind of touring theatre would not exist if there were no international festivals to provide a market framework and commission his work. The paper looks at Lepage and his companies (Robert Lepage Inc. and Ex Machina) as an international corporation that engages its target audience as part of a process of economic, political, social and cultural globalisation, suggesting that the international festival audiences form a Festival Group following on from Huntington's Davos culture and Berger's Faculty Club International. Because Lepage's productions incorporate the audience's response into the creative process, they are substantially influenced by the reception of the Festival Group that both funds and serves as gatekeeper of cultural production. The paper challenges the notion of intercultural theatre based on equality and cultural exchange of local theatres, and rather sees festival theatre in a post-capitalist context where culture is a commodity.