ARTicles vol. 3 i.2a: the far side of the moon

After we probed it, mapped it and visited it, our interest in the moon diminished considerably. By the early 1970s, the last Apollo missions didn’t even make it to television. Still, even though the moon has lost a lot of its mystery, it has lost none of its poetic force. By turning my attention towards certain moments of the space race, I was forced to revisit my childhood and an important part of my teenage years. I had been trying to push back that moment for a long time, but creating this new play left me no choice. The most difficult part for me was certainly when I realized that my younger years, which I believed to be a sunny time in my life, were more often than not set in moon-like colors – blues and greys. – Robert Lepage

Lepage on:

… commune/communicate

I don’t want to communicate, communiquer. I want all of us to commune, communier with the public, and the public with us. You know communier in our religion? To partake of the body and blood of Christ? That’s what I want us to do, but with the public. We give them our body and blood. We become a whole. We share an experience, not an idea. (1989)

… reaching the far side of the moon

As a director you need to have peripheral vision, and for that to happen you have to have visited every corner. In the far side of the moon we were sitting around the table, having this very intense discussion about what the show is about. We’d been playing with reflections from a big mirror that kept flopping forwards and showing the floor and we’re talking about anti-gravity and all these big concepts because the show is about the Russian space program. Out of the corner of my eye I see a technician just kind of rolling some duct tape across the floor – as it rolls past the mirror it looks like it’s floating in mid-air. That became the final scene of the show. I rolled on the floor and the reflection in the mirror looked like I was floating in space. (2003)

… sliding doors

You have to put yourself in an environment where you just kind of throw things, create chaos if you want some kind of order to find its way. … [The sliding doors in the far side of the moon] came about because I was torn between two ideas – a show about space and the moon and Buzz Aldrin, but also my mother had just died and I wanted to talk about that too. Then, completely by chance, I found the washing machine in the garbage. It was just there, and I remembered when my mother took us to the Laundromat; all those great machines – they were space-travel machines. My two ideas connected, so I played with this thing, this image. I wanted to go through its door and I wanted to project on it, so this machine got screwed upright onto a big board but then we needed to get rid of it. So in the next rehearsal session … we had sliding doors. That’s how the set was developed… . I never sit down and squeeze ideas out of myself. No, the material is just there, it’s how you look at it – that’s where the show is. (2003)

… memory becomes myth

To write, to create, you have to be a bit of a mythomaniac. You have to be able to amplify the stories you hear, give a larger dimension to the stories you invent. This is how you transform them into legends and myths. So there’s a very close connection between mythology and mythomania, a connection that has a lot to do with the world of story-telling and memory. (1997)

… Québec

Québec is my home and it’s a very alive and vibrant society, but it’s also very isolated. I could see all these choreographers, much younger than me, traveling and coming back connected to what was going on in the world. The theatre people were fifty years behind and I wondered why. I decided it was because of language so I said, ‘well, what we do is visual, so it shouldn’t be a problem,’ and we began touring The Dragons’ Trilogy all over the world. (2003)

… technology

I am accused of imprisoning myself in technology, but technology is a tool that allows me to explore things. We’re dealing with an audience today that has a very sophisticated narrative vocabulary. I’m not saying that we have to become more cinematic or more televisual, but we have to find a way to invite that audience into the theatre. Film was supposed to have killed theatre, but it liberated it. Every time there is a technological revolution, it gives an artist reason to hope. (1997)

… cinema

Film is very personal … I’m used to working in a much more collective way; even when I do one-man shows there are always a lot of people around me, helping me out. Also, performing for the audience is a collective thing… . But in film it’s extremely private. It’s very personal, it goes with a medium of close-ups, of things you don’t usually see; it’s very indiscreet. That to me was the big difference and the big shock of doing film. I was confronted with myself. (1996)

… the script

Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don’t see it like that. The real writing of a piece comes only when you are performing it … People are always saying to me, ‘Please send me the script of your work,’ and my answer is that what I do is very rarely published because when it’s written down on paper, it just isn’t very interesting. (2002)

… solo shows

It feels very lonely – but it is really a dialogue with the audience, so some evenings you feel more alone than others. But I do two kinds of shows. One where there are loads of people around and there’s dialogue and characters and it’s all great fun, and there are others where I’m alone on stage. Whenever I do a solo show, whatever the theme is, I think it’s about loneliness. (1997)

… emotion on stage

Emotional reserve is not merely a moral issue, it also involves having faith in understanding. I often see student shows in which the actors sob on stage and both the teachers and students seem pleased. But as a member of the audience, it does nothing for me. It feels as if things are happening only on stage … To create a show that’s moving, what you need is not to express as much emotion as possible, but to stylize the emotion, to represent it or to symbolize it. The results are much more enduring and convincing. (1997)

… what do audiences want?

I think there’s something that people want to see and that’s the Olympic spirit. People want to see live risks, not risky stuff, but people risking something for real. They need to see people dropping the ball once in a while to be reassured that it’s a game, that there are human beings playing it, and that what you’re going to see is so authentic because it’s just happening that evening … they want to clear their minds, not empty them … They want to be energized. (1996)

… what is theatre?

I always come back to the same old notion that it’s a gathering, a meeting point. A gathering in the same sense that a group of artists get together to tell a story, and also the collective audience. The audience in a theatre is very different from the audience to a film, because they actually change everything on the stage by their energy. You can’t do that to a TV screen. (1997)

… playing

Plays aren’t puzzles, they are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play … Playing is also a way to find out about the world. One of the things that I have learned over the years is that when I am interviewed and asked what a show is about, I can explain it to the interviewer. But when you perform it on stage, it should be about what you don’t know. It is the gap between the two that makes it really interesting. (2002)