Abstract
Inspired by Robert Lepage’s engagement with a work-in-progress approach and his assertion that the feedback he receives from critics is regularly infused into his work, this chapter examines how the Québécois auteur responded to criticism and adapted two of his seminal works, The Dragons’ Trilogy (1985) and Needles and Opium (1991), decades after they launched his international career. This study connects what I have termed as Lepage’s ‘auto-adaptations’ with the auteur’s drive to revise the problematic politics of representation present in select productions. Through an interrogation of what Lepage calls the ‘spin-off’ to The Dragons’ Trilogy, 2008’s The Blue Dragon, and the 2013 re-envisioning of Needles and Opium, this chapter explores the ways in which Lepage employs and adapts his adaptation-making process to respond to problematic depictions of racial/cultural difference in his original productions.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2011 and 2012, I audited rehearsals for the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera. In 2011, I also watched the final dress of Lepage’s colonial adaptation of The Tempest, set on the Huron-Wendat reservation outside Québec City and interviewed select collaborators.
- 2.
Remounting these iconic and highly popular productions is undoubtedly a lucrative endeavour for Lepage and his theatre company, Ex Machina. The ‘recreation’ of The Dragons’ Trilogy played to sold-out houses in Québec prior to a three-year global run while Needles and Opium , which re-opened in Canada in 2013, sold-out in Toronto, returned for a second run in 2015 and continued its well-attended international tour in 2017. Moreover, in the decades separating the original productions of The Dragons’ Trilogy and Needles and Opium and their adaptations, technology has made significant advances. Lepage’s enthusiasm to return to these seminal works with new tools, particularly Needles and Opium , a production that initially relied on an overhead projector to craft its images, is evident; of the new set for Needles and Opium , in which characters are suspended in a giant cube and interact with digital images, Lepage comments, ‘It’s as if the technology has caught up with the ideas of the show’ (Lepage 2015).
- 3.
I use quotations around the term authenticity as I believe we need to trouble this term. Who is to say what qualifies as ‘authentic’ and how might strict adherence to authenticity limit the scope of interpretation? In Chap. 5, I cite La Tempête’s use of dances that are an Indigenous appropriation of a Western form reconfigured since the mid-twentieth century by Huron-Wendat people. By including these dances in the production, Lepage ‘demonstrated a willingness to dispense with discourses of authenticity and include hybridized indigenous performance modes’ (Poll 2014, 345).
- 4.
Since his inception in The Dragons’ Trilogy, the character of Pierre has resurfaced in numerous Ex Machina projects, including The Seven Streams of the River Ota, and the films Le Confessionel and Nô. Lepage references this character as his ‘alter-ego’ and explains that he acts as a stand-in for the audience (Lepage and Charest 1997, 29–30).
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Poll, M. (2018). Auto-adaptations: Re-‘Writing’ The Dragons’ Trilogy and Needles and Opium for the Twenty-First Century. In: Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73368-5_6
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