Abstract
Prefaced by a brief summary of the body of work devoted to Robert Lepage’s devised oeuvre, this section notes the limitations of scholarship surrounding his stagings of canonical texts and outlines what a full-length study interrogating the Québécois auteur’s non-logocentric approach to adapting extant texts, which I’ve termed scenographic dramaturgy, can offer. In this introductory gloss, scenographic dramaturgy is unpacked as it applies to non-text-based forms of adaptation and is contextualized amidst calls for new dramaturgical forms. The introduction concludes by positing how the book will contribute to the growing body of contemporary research devoted to adaptation and, more broadly, the process of making a performance (and not solely the product of this work).
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase ‘scenographic dramaturgy’ has been employed to describe a wide variety of theatre and dance scenography (such as work by Nick Cave, Michael Levine and Carol Brown) in publications by Pamela Howard, Karoline Gritzner, Natalie Rewa, Carol Brown, Anne Niemetz, Margie Medlin and Russell Scoones, among others. These authors’ definitions of the term differ widely and do not inform my specific use of ‘scenographic dramaturgy’ as an auteur-generated form of adaptation in which visual and physical performance texts function independently of the dramatic text.
- 2.
In 2011 and 2012, I audited rehearsals for the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera. In 2011, I attended the final dress of Lepage’s colonial adaptation of The Tempest , set on the Huron-Wendat reservation outside Québec City.
- 3.
Canada’s bilingual education initiative, launched by a group of Anglophone parents in St. Lambert, Québec in 1965, gave Anglophone families the option of having their children educated entirely in French from kindergarten through to the final years of high school, when certain English language courses were made available to them (Safty 1991, 474).
- 4.
Like Bluebeard’s Castle/ Erwartung , Lepage’s production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress was the subject of brief reviews in Canadian Theatre Research and Opera Canada.
- 5.
The Nightingale.
- 6.
Introduced in 2013 by then Premier Pauline Marois, the proposed Charter of Québec Values would prohibit civil servants from wearing certain religious symbols including hijabs, niqabs, kippas and turbans.
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Poll, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73368-5_1
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