States of Play: Locating Quebec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil

The Guardian

“What objects do you always carry with you?”

Robert Lepage:

“My passport.”

The Guardian

“What is your greatest fear?”

Robert Lepage:

“Losing my passport.” ¹

But what exactly was this “reinvented circus”? Just what it said it was: A circus that came from nowhere but was looking for its roots. In the absence of any, it determined to create some. ²

Figure 1.

National Arts Centre / Centre national des Arts, Ottawa, Canada. Photo credit: National Arts Centre / Mark Fowler / Metropolis. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 2.

Caserne Dalhousie, Quebec City, Quebec. Photo credit: Andrew Lavender. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 3.

The Studio, Montréal, Québec. Photo credit: Alexandre Legault, Cirque du Soleil. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 4.

The Big Top. Photo: Eric Piché, Cirque du Soleil. Reprinted with permission.

Within the past two years, both the Cirque du Soleil and Ex Machina (led by Robert Lepage) have set down institutional roots in the province in which their work began, Québec. In February 1997, the Cirque du Soleil—a post-modern circus without animals—inaugurated its center of creation and production, “Le Studio,” in a northeastern quarter of Montréal. In June of the same year, Ex Machina opened its center, “La Caserne Dalhousie,” in Québec City. However, as the above epigraphs indicate, these troupes’ relationships to their Québec location are rather more fraught than their newly (re-)established roots might suggest. Québec provides Lepage, Ex Machina’s most likely “deus,” with the means to work outside Québec and to travel elsewhere with his Canadian passport. The “nowhere” that is Québec for the Cirque provides that company with an empty space that allows them to create their own aesthetic form, their “reinvented circus.”

Despite these organizations’ apparent ambivalence toward their Québec location, successive Québec governments have embraced Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque as “Québécois.” Federalist and indépendentiste, Liberal and Parti Québécois, Québec governments have employed financial means and public relations to stake their claim. Josette Féral writes: “[O]fficial discourses tend to identify geographical space with ideological space, claiming title to all theatre created in their territories, which becomes a source of national pride.” ³ Like much intercultural theatre work, Ex Machina and the Cirque question the presumed contiguity of geographical and ideological space through their organizational structures, the international networks in which they participate, and their performance codes. The Québec government’s response to this dissociation of geography and national identity has been to use these companies’ international practices to buttress its own nationalist aspirations, by incorporating their peregrinations into an international definition of Québec.

Both Ex Machina and Cirque du Soleil originate in Québec, a nation without a state whose representatives exhibit profound ambivalence toward their place (within the Dominion of Canada). Both Ex Machina and Cirque du Soleil produce shows which tour the globe, travelling established international performance circuits. Sharing an institutionally provisional nationhood, as well as international aspirations, Ex Machina and the Cirque provide material for considering the many meanings of the national—and specifically the Québécois—in its interactions with the international. Nonetheless, the companies also differ in important ways. Ex Machina is an auteur-centered theatre company dominated by Lepage; its self-generated productions tour widely and play predominantly at international theatre festivals and in what Marvin Carlson has called “pilgrimage theatres.” ⁴ The Cirque du Soleil is a circus without stars; its multiple circus troupes present their touring shows organized from multinational headquarters in their own circus tents. These companies’ differences permit us to consider some of the varieties of Québécois international performance, in particular its relationships to locations and finance, as well as to the nation. Whereas Ex Machina’s operations presume a relationship between production and a Québec location...