by Joseph Bradshaw
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| Robert Lepage |
From his recent upturning of
Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met to his reinvention of the hardboiled detective story in
Polygraph (presented at 1990’s Next Wave Festival),
Robert Lepage can always be found at the forefront of theatrical innovation. Also an acclaimed film director, Lepage’s work for the stage strikes an inventive balance between filmed and live action. His deep understanding of the potential of contemporary technology is used to reinterpret the past, and his results are always astonishing. What else would we expect from contemporary theater’s foremost Renaissance man?
Since
Polygraph, BAM has presented Lepage’s stage work on the regular. For the 1992 Next Wave a 35-year-old Lepage—who by that point was already an established figure on the international scene—performed his triumphal one-man show
Needles and Opium. This piece, which
Mel Gussow called“a chamber work marked by its absolute precision,” crosscut the lives of Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau with elements of Lepage’s own autobiography, in a gymnastic medley of musings on jazz, travel, Surrealism, and the act of creation itself.
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| Needles and Opium. Photo: Alastair Muir |
Needles and Opium paved the way for Lepage’s future innovations, including his controversial reimagining of several Shakespeare productions such as
Macbeth and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To the mixture of film and live performance Lepage added puppetry in
The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1996 Next Wave Festival), which told the epic story of westerners who arrive at Hiroshima and come face to face with themselves in devastation and illumination.
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| Lipsynch. Photo: Richard Termine |
Lepage continued this epic scope in
Lipsynch (2009 Next Wave Festival), an eight-hour meditation on the creative potential and destructive power of the human voice. His most recent BAM engagement was
The Nightingale and Other Short Fables (Spring 2011), which combined two of Stravinsky’s chamber ballets with traditional Vietnamese puppetry.
He returns next month for his ninth BAM production with the New York premiere of
The Blue Dragon, a tale of love and disenchantment in modern-day Shanghai
—a fitting piece for a globetrotting artist whose themes are increasingly universal. For Lepage, universality is rooted in direct experience. The key to successfully addressing the universal,
as he himself says, is to “talk about what goes on as honestly as possible. Talk about what goes on in your kitchen, and anybody will recognize themselves in that.”
