Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights: Robert Lepage in Conversation with Rémy Charest by Rémy Charest (review)

Book Reviews 499 Ibsen's plays and co-produced (with Marion Lea) and starred in Hedda Gabler in 1891 (16t).lbsen's popularity amongst theatre women would come as no surprise to Joan Templeton; both authors dispute traditional criticism while providing the reader with a wealth of information about some truly revolutionary theatre artists. SHELLEY SCOTT, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO REMY CHAREST. Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights: Robert Lepage in Conversation with Remy Charest. Trans. Wanda Romer Taylor. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf t998. Pp. 196, illustrated. $21.95, paperback. In 1994 Remy Charest encountered Robert Lepage at a crucial juncture in the artist's work - at the first open rehearsal of the epic Seven Streams a/the River Ota, the inaugural production of Lepage's multimedia theatre company Ex Machina in Quebec City. Charest met with Lepage over the next year, researching his work, past and in progress, while Lepage maintained a busy international schedule: directing A Dream Play in Sweden, editing Le Confessional in Paris, and preparing Elsinore. The conversations, first brought together in Robert Lepage: Quelques zones de liberte (1995), and translated by Wanda Romer Taylor as Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights (1998) are meant to capture Lepage's thoughts on the making of theatre, his cultural reference points, his place in international theatre and his experiments as a film maker. Charest has organized the conversations under six main headings, which are meant to foreground Lepage's fascination with Geography, Mythology, Creation and Paradox and are bracketed by generalized sections designated as "Beginning," an anecdotal biographical introduction, and "End," or projection into the future. Charest explains his method in his introduction: There are a few segments ofquestions and answers which are transcribed directly as they happened, but other chapters were constructed as coherent essays by Lepage - often because a continuous exploration of a theme had quickly emerged in our discussion while imaginary dialogues were assembled from disparate bits and pieces and yet other chapters were built in more playful or analytic ways. I wrote introductions to chapters only when I felt they were necessary - sometimes Robert's words spoke for themselves and I did not see what Jcould add to them. This irregular form came quite naturally in the course of our "tennis match", as did the general organization of the sections. (10) In his introduction Lepage endorses Charest's approach by emphasizing his rejection of documentary in favour of memorial contemplation, which allows for "misperception" (16) as an integral creative tool (17). Lepage cites the modus operandi of Ex Machina - his concept of a production company for the 500 BOOK REVIEWS current technological age - as a model for the interviews: "The outcome and the narrative mechanism are still unforeseen, mysterious. and it's up to us to uncover them"(23). That is to say, he has left Charest the task of organizing what emerged in conversation. As each chapter revisits some aspect of Lepage's creativity, the image of Robert Lepage is constituted as a work in progress. Lepage reflects on the influence of Jean Caeteau on his thinking, or the excitement of collaboration with Peter Gabriel, or the stimulation to lateral thinking of Japanese ideograms , or on the awareness of the performativity of spatial and aural environments , and on the way in which he considers the body in performance at various points in the volume. The effect of this method is to encourage the reader to consider how the simultaneity achieved in performance can be reconfigured in the linearity of print. Complementing the wide-ranging discussions is a chronology of Lepage's professional work from t978- 1997, with an updated projection of his work until 1999 (175- 92). This listing is particularly helpful since the discourse of the volume concentrates primarily on me landmark productions that have toured internationally: La Tri/ogie des Dragons, Tectonic Plates, Polygraph, Needles and Opium and The Seven Streams of the River Ota. Other productions in Montreal, Quebec City and Ottawa cited in the chronology do not enter into the discussion. The range of Lepage's work, which has included theatre for young audiences, opera and puppetry, would make for intriguing commentary, but Lepage's own interest is in the new possibilities of Ex...