Dhe man who knows no present sits on a bench in the Berlin Schaubühne. He looks at his palms as he waits, as if reading his future from them. If you speak to him, he stands up abruptly and looks surprised. Look and smile and emerge from another world.
The Canadian theater maker Robert Lepage is still not known to many in Germany. Unlike Peter Brook or Ariane Mnouchkine, who are beaming faces of world theater, Lepage, who is now sixty-four, is still considered an insider tip in this country. He was last invited to the Berliner Festspiele in 2006 with his “Andersen Project”. At the FIND Festival at the Berlin Schaubühne, various works by the theater director, actor and filmmaker can be seen for the first time in a long time.
Less opinion, more poetry
He acts like his own deputy. Not like a great artist who, with his company “Ex Machine”, has shown productions all over the world that have been understood and celebrated transnationally in their dreamy simplicity. However, the German theater doesn’t have much time for Lepage – and the interest in the other direction is also quite limited. What is staged on German stages usually strikes him as a bit “opinionated,” he says quietly, too much to intentionally disparage and denigrate the original play. “My approach, on the other hand, is: less opinion, more poetry”.
The works of the working-class child, born in Québec City in 1957, do indeed stand out due to their gently poetic, never boastful formal language. Lepage, who trained as an actor in Paris and was initially artistic director of the Théâtre français in Ottawa, began touring with his own projects in the early 1990s – for example with “Needles and Opium”, a play about Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau. In 1992 he staged Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as the first North American at the Royal National Theater in London. In 1994 Lepage founded his company “Ex Machina” in Québec – whose most legendary production “The Seven Streams of the River Ota” (created between 1994 and 1996) has now been shown in a newly cast and slightly revised version at the Schaubühne in Berlin.
Knows no present: Robert Lepage
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Bild: Picture Alliance
For a few years, Lepage also worked with Cirque du Soleil, creating spectacular productions like “La Trilogie des Dragons” and earning good money with international guest performances. In 2015, he returned to the stage with 887, a memoir fantasy about his childhood home. This production will also be shown at the Schaubühne on April 9th and 10th.
Lepage’s productions are characterized by an unusual sensitivity to bodies and moods, with texts and theories playing a subordinate role. The sphere of the political is usually only touched upon very cautiously. “Basically, I rarely speak directly about current affairs,” says Lepage, “because I prefer to tell what moves me about my time through the physicality of the body or the expression of a face.”
Violent debate in Canada
What happened in 2018 must have hit this shy artist all the harder. The Montreal Jazz Festival censored one of his productions under pressure from indigenous activists, who accused him of “disguising white actors as Afro-American slaves” and thus violating the dignity of the colonized. Another Lepage work, Slav, in which only two of the seven actors on stage were black, also sparked heated debate in Canada and beyond.