Robert Lepage, Connecting Flights by Rémy Charest (review)

humanities 561 the laws of representation. Consequently, `if for Christie ``there is always a thought concerning the effect to be produced'' (Peeters, ``Tombeau'' 128), it does not mean that her stories actually enable the reader to carry on the investigation beyond their representational ending.' Certainly, many scholars of detective fiction would disagree with this offhand statement, which requires more evidence to substantiate its claim. Given the attention focused on Paul Auster (three essays in all), one does wonder why there is not more attention devoted to, say, thèmetaphysics' of detective novelists like Raymond Chandler. Clearly, readers who are looking for a work that concentrates on more conventional detective writers will not find them here. Detecting Texts is, nonetheless, a fine example of the ways in which a fusion of theory and close reading can engender an illuminating and engaging scholarly work. (PRISCILLA L. WALTON) Rémy Charest. Robert Lepage, Connecting Flights. Translated by Wanda Romer Taylor Knopf Canada 1998. xii, 196. $21.95 Rémy Charest announces in his introduction to this English edition of Robert Lepage, Quelques zones de liberté (1995), this is not a conventional interview book of questions and answers, but a fluid interactive work revolving around various encounters with one of the locomotives of Quebec experimental theatre, Robert Lepage, at diverse sites, and during the course of various projects. The discussion takes the form of short essays by Lepage on what he sees as the very heart of his field:`transformation and connections.' The foreword by John Ralston Saul, a happy addition to the original French text, emphasizes Lepage's creative use of transformation staging, and places it at the forefront of the Canadian struggle for a share in `the central recording mechanism' of civilization that is culture. Charest's introduction, more substantial and contextualizing than the French version, allows a readership less familiar with Lepage's productions to benefit by the discussion, which revolves around several axes: culture as a marker of national identity and yet a vehicle allowing border crossing, the interest in process rather than in product, and the emphasis on theatre as play in the ludic sense rather than as literature. Lepage reinjects the notion of play back into play-acting, connects it with competitive sport and its superb trained bodies that transcend and transfigure. He sees theatre not as fiction but as spectacle B a meeting-place between architecture and the body, image, music, sound, dance, and mime. He judiciously calls attention to the cleavage in Canadian culture between the British text-based tradition, the anglophone audience's desire to listen to the language, and the visually oriented francophone spectateurs who come to watch the image-making, the staging, 562 letters in canada 1999 the spectacle. Lepage's productions desacralize language partly by emphasizing its dimension of pure sound, at times foregrounded technologically by a sampler that filters and `recognizes' the different phonemes and associates a specific pitch for each, thus emitting musical sounds that vary from one performance to another, and from one linguistic version to another. Part of the transformation process which he declares to be the very foundation of his work is the strategy of reversing the conventional order of theatrical production from writing/rehearsal/performance/translation, to rehearsal/performance/translation/writing, with the starting point of most creations becoming the final point of Lepage's collective creations. The performances of these works-in-progress are not considered as the final fixed outcome, but as stages in the evolving creative process: public forms of actors' improvisations, rehearsals to which audiences are invited to re/act. A selection of photographs gives readers insights into Lepage's stagecraft, notably his trademark techniques of playing with time and space, his magical metamorphoses and technical sleights of hand. These range from superimposition and stratification, and a cinematic shifting perspective produced by minimalist but sophisticated use of bodies and lighting, to sets whose highly technological conception paradoxically allows great simplicity, whether they be pivoting islands of steel or large rotating cubes indicating disorder or the passage of time. The use of exogenous cultural materials B performing taï-chi to the music of Peter Gabriel or Philip Glass B is rooted in a...