The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.
The book’s title references the experimentation so integral to Lepage’s creative process and the ways in which he and his creative arts company, Ex Machina, have always been attuned to the synergistic possibilities that emerge when art encounters science and technology. Whether as a playwright, actor, film director, or stage director, Lepage is forever in search of new mutations of form and expression, and his unexpected narratives often write themselves out of discoveries he makes when staging a piece – indeed stagecraft often guides story in Lepage’s creative realm.
This full-colour volume will be of keen interest for theatre practitioners of all kinds, from set designers to directors, from academics to fans.

1114937734
The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.
The book’s title references the experimentation so integral to Lepage’s creative process and the ways in which he and his creative arts company, Ex Machina, have always been attuned to the synergistic possibilities that emerge when art encounters science and technology. Whether as a playwright, actor, film director, or stage director, Lepage is forever in search of new mutations of form and expression, and his unexpected narratives often write themselves out of discoveries he makes when staging a piece – indeed stagecraft often guides story in Lepage’s creative realm.
This full-colour volume will be of keen interest for theatre practitioners of all kinds, from set designers to directors, from academics to fans.

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The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage

The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage

The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage

The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage

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$29.95 
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Overview

For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.
The book’s title references the experimentation so integral to Lepage’s creative process and the ways in which he and his creative arts company, Ex Machina, have always been attuned to the synergistic possibilities that emerge when art encounters science and technology. Whether as a playwright, actor, film director, or stage director, Lepage is forever in search of new mutations of form and expression, and his unexpected narratives often write themselves out of discoveries he makes when staging a piece – indeed stagecraft often guides story in Lepage’s creative realm.
This full-colour volume will be of keen interest for theatre practitioners of all kinds, from set designers to directors, from academics to fans.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780889227743
Publisher: Talonbooks, Limited
Publication date: 12/16/2014
Pages: 416
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Ludovic Fouquet is a visual artist, actor, teacher, director, and founder of the multimedia theatre company songes mécaniques (Mechanical Dreams) in Blois, France. After training as an actor and dancer, Fouquet earned his PhD studying Robert Lepage’s artistic practice and its relationship to technology. Fouquet edited La trilogie des dragons (The Dragons’ Trilogy, L’instant meme, 2005), and developed a photographic monograph of this work. In addition to frequent speaking engagements at French universities, Fouquet contributes regularly to numerous theatre and contemporary art magazines, including Cahiers de Théâtre, JEU, ETC Montréal, and theatre-contemporain.net. Fouquet divides his time between France and Quebec.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Machina 3

Part 1 Puppet Theatre and Quarry: Two Models in the Visual Laboratory 9

Theatre of the object 10

A puppet-theatre set 24

The box: The Seven Streams of the River Ota 35

The cube 42

The actor as puppet? 44

The shadow and the quarry 55

Part 2 The Visual Laboratory of the Imagination: Technological Echoes 65

The imago 67

First echo: light technology 70

"Theatre begins in a quarry and we light a fire" 71

Creator of shadows 75

Between shadow and light: the mirror 77

Technological experiments 83

Second echo: photography 87

Photography as a reference 87

Photography as an index 95

Photography as a metaphor for the psychic apparatus 102

Third echo: cinema 108

A film narrative 109

A movie set 115

A cinematic gaze 120

Fourth echo: video 132

From the monitor to the movie screen 133

Video and the mirror 141

Video palimpsest 149

Fifth echo: a virtual environment 162

The modelling route 163

The digitization route 166

The palimpsest space 174

Sixth echo: sound technology 181

The issues of amplification 181

Sound technology, or the art of accompaniment 187

Sound technology: a new sort of protagonist 19$

Part 3 Experiments in the Visual Laboratory: Echoes of Chaos 105

Lepage's practice: from resource to system 205

The resource: the heart and focal point of the rehearsal 207

From openness to vertigo: Lepage's approach 216

Intervals and overlaps in phases of work 227

Lepage's stage: a multicultural space 235

Experimenting with the unknown 255

The stage: a space for unlikely encounters 241

Orientalism and multimedia: a new baroque? 249

A baroque-dominated reading of the Orient 250

Tension and spatial organization: the ultimate embodiment of the baroque 258

Vertical ambiguity 271

Part 4 The Visual Laboratory in Conclusion 289

Epilogue 297

The lure of geometry (cubes, mills, and circles) 303

A 360-degree theatre 314

A geometric approach in The Tempest. 319

Continuing collective creation 321

A return to his roots? 328

Opera and Vie Ring: virgin territory 332

Notes 339

Chronology of Robert Lepage Productions 363

Bibliography 381

Image Credits 393

Index 395

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