-
14. “You must see to understand …”: Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
14 “You must see to understand …”: Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy Christine Lorre-Johnston The breadth of Robert Lepage’s work is impressive both in terms of technical performance and of audience. His plays rely on a diversity of media, in particular screen videos in a métissage of drama and film (Lepage, “Du théâtre d’ombres” 332); they also address a range of questions that speak to a varied audience, and have been performed throughout the world. La Trilogie des Dragons (The Dragons’ Trilogy) is a collaborative work (originally co-authored and performed by Marie Brassard, Jean Casault, Lorraine Côté, Marie Gignac, Robert Lepage, and Marie Michaud [Charest 179–180]), which spans from 1932 to 1985 in an east–west arc that links Québec City to Toronto and Vancouver. It is an important piece as it marks the internationalisation of the work done by Lepage’s company, and has gained worldwide acclaim since it was produced in 1987 at the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal. However, it has also been criticized for relying heavily on clichés in its representation of the Orient and Otherness. Jennifer Harvie sums up this problematic aspect of the play: “The central criticism made of the handling of other cultures in the play is that it is relentlessly clichéd, so that, instead of productively exploring other cultures, it reinforces diminishing and often naïve perceptions of them” (113). Along similar lines, and before Harvie, Jean-Luc Denis, in a special 1987 issue of Jeu devoted to The Dragons’ Trilogy, declared that he saw in it an oversimplifying will to make it accessible that confined it to the banal, as well as a saddening lack of vision (159). The disparity of responses to The Dragons’ Trilogy urges us to 225 examine questions of reception and viewpoint in relation to clichés, voice, and vision. As Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen point out in their joint work on literary clichés, reception is part of the process that constitutes clichés, to the extent that a cliché is ultimately the result of a certain reading (9). Whose voice is given to be heard on the stage and how? How are clichés used, and what kind of vision can be conveyed through them? To address these questions , it is crucial to bear in mind that the trilogy distinguishes itself by being a collective creation and a work-in-progress, both of which imply a heavy reliance on improvisation and on a grid of linguistic and cultural clichés (and alternately stereotypes, as defined further). It also entails the possibility for the play to evolve over time and to develop organically with the society it grows out of. As other studies in this volume suggest, artistic collaboration and improvisation are often tied to a will to unsettle or to subvert standard views or ideas in a given society, and for other voices to be heard (see Davey, Calder, and Heble and Siemerling). The trilogy thus addresses a certain idea of China (and more broadly of the Other) in Québec (and more broadly in Canada and the West), but it does not approach China from within, as Pain not Bread does by including Chinese poetry in an anthology that will certainly cause a degree of initial puzzlement to the reader (see Calder). Nor does it establish “face-to-face interaction” (Heble and Siemerling, this vol., p. 48) between participants from diverse backgrounds, as is the case in the ICASP project presented by Heble and Siemerling. The trilogy relies on clichés, that is to say ready-made, familiar figures, and brings together actors from the same Québec community, so that the China the play imagines is largely seen from a unilateral perspective. How they function will be dealt with by examining the varying relations between clichés and audience, transformation as a part of the general creative process of the play, and the metamorphosis of clichés on stage. 1. Clichés and Audience It is important to note that what is referred to as clichés by Lepage and critics in discussions of the trilogy are often, strictly speaking, stereotypes. The latter are characterized by Ruth Amossy and Anne Herschberg Pierrot as ready-made representations, pre-existing cultural grids through which each person filters the surrounding reality (27). For example, the idea that Chinese immigrants in Canada work in laundries...