Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work by Melissa Poll

Reviewed by: Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work by Melissa Poll Natalie Rewa ROBERT LEPAGE’S SCENOGRAPHIC DRAMATURGY: THE AESTHETIC SIGNATURE AT WORK. By Melissa Poll. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; pp. 200. Melissa Poll addresses the work of Québécois theatre artist Robert Lepage from the refreshing angle of scenographic dramaturgy—the use of scenic elements as dramaturgical form—as an approach to adaptation. Lepage’s devising method combines the “RSVP cycles” developed by architect Lawrence Halprin and dancer Anna Halprin with Alain Knapp’s techniques for drawing out actorly creativity. The result is a dynamic model for performance creation that emphasizes material resources and artistic collaboration. From his own early solo shows and the collectively devised epics Dragon’s Trilogy (1980s) and Seven Streams of the River Ota (1990s), Lepage has concurrently been probing traditions of theatrical, operatic, choreographic, and circus performance on international stages. When in 1994 he and his collaborators in Quebec City founded the theatre company Ex Machina, they also established the studio-cum-laboratory la Caserne, named after the building’s original function as a fire hall. In the fall of 2019, Ex Machina, under Lepage’s artistic direction, inaugurated Le Diamant, a new performance hub in a former YMCA building in downtown Quebec City, to feature local, national, and international artists. Given Lepage’s collaborations in these settings and in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, Poll’s study of his approach to adaptation is particularly timely. The “aesthetic signature” of Poll’s subtitle refers to the energy inherent in Lepage’s devised creations. Focusing on Lepage’s treatment of existing and often problematic texts, with a critical eye trained on his artistic partnerships, Poll identifies a hybrid approach that combines modernist directorial presence with the collaborative deployment of scenographic technologies. Using a handful of landmark productions, [End Page 122] she argues, in short, that Lepage’s use of scenographic elements as dramaturgical resources in his adaptations yields a postdramatic methodology that extends to the entire “visual and physical world of a production” (3). Lepage’s multidisciplinarity allows him to adopt French director Pascal Ram-bert’s expanded definition of “ecriture scènique” to include methodologies, technologies, and bodies in the creation process (36). In making her argument, Poll demonstrates the usefulness of centering both collaborative negotiation and dramaturgical historicity in the study of scenography. Her study is productively organized using a three-part framework. First, Poll considers the temporal aspects of Lepage’s scenography. In the immediacy of performance, she argues, scenic elements may be read as the “kinetic text of the collaborators,” as much an onstage agent as the actors themselves (3). Inevitably, this frame brings the contributions of specific collaborators to the forefront of Poll’s analysis. She considers, for example, Lepage’s ongoing collaborations with set designer Carl Filion on the computer-operated machinery that dominated the Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera. In each of her case studies, Poll is mindful of the accusations leveled at Lepage that his works coopt cultural forms. Against this perception, she characterizes his engagement with other cultures as a “productive interculturalism [that] is beginning to unfold below the performative surface through Lepage’s adaptation process” (187). In The Tempest, created with the Huron Wendat Nation for Montreal’s outdoor Wendake Theatre, Poll reveals how cultural hybridity in casting, scenography, and choreography subverted discourses of authenticity. In Lepage’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Other Stories, she shows how Mara Gotler’s costume designs combined with puppet artist Michael Curry’s Vietnamese water puppets and athletic shadow puppetry (developed on a research trip with Lepage to Vietnam) to create a “Chinoiserie by design” (63–73). Poll also nimbly puts into perspective Lepage’s adaptations of his own earlier work. For The Blue Dragon, his 2010 working of The Dragon’s Trilogy (1985/2003), Lepage used dancer Tai Wei Foo’s choreography to evoke the multiplicities of Shanghai’s past and present. When Lepage later commissioned illustrator Fred Jourdain to create a graphic novel of the work, their aim was to use the illustrator’s visual resources to interrogate...

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