Views & Reviews

Abstract

The relationship of jazz and theatre, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, is a complex one. The three reviews featured here speak to some of the diverse influences jazz, and the community it comes out of, has on contemporary theatre. Kate Bligh’s review discusses a collaborative work created for the Montreal International Jazz Festival by one of Canada’s best known men of the theatre, Robert Lepage, in collaboration with musician Peter Gabriel. Her description of the piece, which took place in a cabaret setting reminiscent of the early jazz scene, demonstrates the affinity of Lepage’s creation techniques with the jazz process of improvising to create multiple variations on well-known motifs. In the end though, Bligh wonders why Lepage’s use of these techniques yielded a series of images that, taken together, had only limited impact. Why, she asks, did the transitions between scenes sometimes seem more interesting than the scenes themselves? Was the technology overwhelming the liveness of the onstage performers? Or was there a more serious problem here, a problem that is perhaps evidenced in directorial choices that emphasized the formal qualities of the piece over its social meanings, as in a sequence where a monkey and a Zulu warrior seem to be presented as virtual stand-ins for each other?