Art & Performance Notes

ART & PERFORMANCE NOTES

Robert Lepage, conjuring the memory of his father in a local diner from years past, in 887. Photo courtesy Erick Labbé/ Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 Robert Lepage in Double Time Technics and Media in the Interim

Joseph Cermatori

L’Amour de Loin, by Kaija Saariaho, libretto by Amin Maalouf, directed by Robert Lepage, an Ex Machina Production, The Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY, Winter 2016; 887, created and performed by Robert Lepage, an Ex Machina production, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, Spring 2017.

he 2016–17 New York season included not one, but two opportunities for audiences to see new work by the acclaimed French-Canadian theatre T artist Robert Lepage. The first was the United States premiere of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin (Love from Afar), a work that initially debuted in Salzburg in 2000 under Peter Sellars’s direction, and that Lepage staged in a new production for the Festival d’Opéra de Québec in Summer 2015. The second, which likewise premiered in Canada over Summer 2015, was the enigmatically titled 887, a new solo show hearkening back to the director’s earlier projects in that form (such as La Face cachée de la Lune, 2000), and an oppor- tunity for New York audiences to glimpse Lepage himself performing onstage in a production of his own creation. Both welcome contributions to New York’s performance landscape, the two projects amounted, however coincidentally, to a pair of sustained reflections on the relationship between technological mediation and time, revealing a depth of thoughtfulness, craftsmanship, and elegance in Lepage’s work.

L’Amour de Loin made history at the Met for being the company’s first opera by a female composer in over one hundred years, its only predecessor being Der Wald, a one-act work by the English composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth that appeared in 1903. (Notably, L’Amour also boasted the involvement of Finnish

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 conductor Susanna Mälkki, who is only the fourth female conductor to work at the Metropolitan in its long history.) Saariaho’s score has since been hailed as a classic of the modern operatic repertory, a work of extraordinary erudition and immense emotional weight.

The libretto, by the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf, is set in the twelfth century and concerns the Aquitanian troubadour-prince Jaufré Rudel (played in the Met production by baritone Eric Owens). World weary and spurned by his companions, Rudel desires the love of a woman who is “Beautiful without the arrogance of beauty. Noble without the arrogance of nobility. Pious without the arrogance of piety.” Through a mysterious Pilgrim (mezzo soprano Tamara Mumford) whom he eventually conscripts as a go-between, Jaufré learns in the first act that just such a woman exists on the other side of the world, the Count- ess Clémence of Tripoli (soprano Susanna Phillips), and he is soon gripped with obsessive passion for her. From there, the ensuing four acts are meticulously structured around a series of spare, alternating scenes culminating in the pair’s meeting. Act two depicts Clémence learning of Jaufré’s love; act three, his decision to make the journey to find her, and her astonishment to learn of his quest; act four, the long passage across the sea, when Jaufré is seized by an almost Kierkeg- aardian anxiety and sickness; and act five, their final coming together, when he expires upon seeing Clémence for the first and only time.

With only three characters, bolstered by a double chorus, the opera has something of the strictness, purity, and economy of a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile, focusing as it does on love and poetry in the time of the troubadours, the scenario reflects a collision of romantic and modernist motifs, something akin to Debussy and Maeterlinck’s 1902 symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, with a similar atmosphere of mystic stillness. As with so much tragic drama, most of L’Amour de Loin orients itself toward the coming of an immense and fateful future, and the suspenseful uncertainty of the libretto takes form and color in the score through thick hues of dread.

The score comes alive most vibrantly in the last two acts, with virtuosic vocal writing for Jaufré, suffering the strange terrors of anticipation while traveling to his destination, and for Clémence as she attempts to comprehend, let alone mourn, his sudden appearance and death. Musically, Saariaho assembles a highly textured orchestral palette, punctuated with birdsong effects, bell-tones, wails, and ecstatic trilling. Beneath these layers, a dense, tremulous mass of sound from the strings continuously darkens the opera’s musical world, distending and roiling like the sea, while a searing stratum of flutes caps over it, creating the effect of low-hanging clouds rippling with electrical currents. At times these currents give

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 Top: Robert Lepage, reimagining Québec’s Parc des Braves, in 887. Bottom: Robert Lepage, appearing before a Top: Eric Owens as Jaufré Rudel and Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. full-sized dollhouse representing his childhood apartment, in 887. Photos courtesy Stephanie Berger/Brooklyn Bottom: Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim, Eric Owens as Jaufré Rudel, and Susanna Phillips as Clémence in Academy of Music. Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. Photos courtesy Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 way to explosive eruptions of sound: though relatively little happens dramatically speaking, Saariaho is unafraid to push things to theirs noisiest limits in moments of thunderous feeling.

The stage world Lepage creates for this obscure parable is richly poetic. Against a backdrop of the deepest black, he counterposes a sea of ribbon LED lights stretched lengthwise across the stage in a recessive series. These lights form a pyscho-technological landscape, shifting in hue and undulating from scene to scene, becoming lime and turquoise and deep lavender and bloody crimson, and in some of the opera’s most memorable passages, shimmering gold. Meanwhile, the two lovers appear mostly above in a strange and gravity-less suspension, hovering on a pair of floating, turning stairwells, the LED light enveloping them in a peculiar, technological halo effect.

It should be said: the technical elements are superbly coordinated in this production, in a way that hasn’t always been the case in Lepage’s work. His 2008 Damnation of Faust for the Met seemed to me like an extended gimmick with interactive digital televisuals, while the astonishing machinery of his Ring cycle is always in danger of upstaging both the music and the performers alike, or simply malfunctioning. Here, Lepage gracefully frames the opera’s central concern with the auratic quality of distance (le lointain) as a question best contemplated through technical media. “I was Adam and distance was my earthly paradise,” Jaufré intones, surrendering to nearness as though it were a catastrophe as he gradually approaches the beatific vision of his beloved. Meanwhile, the glow that suffuses him recalls nothing more than the hypnotic radiance of the smartphone and laptop screens that are increasingly holding all of us twenty-first-century audience members in their thrall. In Lepage’s hands, the loin of Saariaho’s opera is the space of technological mediation and the machine, and by extension, the space of theatricality itself—spectacular, mesmerizing, disturbing, and sublime.

A different set of concerns are at play in Lepage’s 887, a piece that probably could not be farther in outward appearance from L’Amour de Loin. Where L’Amour spends most of its energy on the unknown future that is to come, 887 turns its gaze resolutely to the past. Lepage appears onstage at the production’s outset to give the customary pre-performance speech, asking spectators to deactivate their smartphones, before gliding effortlessly into the role of raconteur. 887, he explains, originated from an invitation he received some years ago to perform a gala marking the fortieth anniversary of La Nuit de la Poésie in Montreal, an anniversary at which numerous Canadian celebrities would be appearing to recite consequential poems from the original Nuit years ago. His assigned task was to memorize and recite Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 poem “Speak White”—a work that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 decries the oppressiveness of English language speakers in separatist Québec and the history of North American slavery all at once.

It’s a somewhat longer poem, and 887 apparently grew out of Lepage’s difficulties in consigning it to memory. His solution was to follow the ancient mnemonic practice of the ars memoria: to learn the poem by heart through the creation of an imaginary memory theatre, a mental space filled with loci—that is, with images, niches, objects, repositories, pathways, and so forth—each of which would contain an associative trigger recalling part of the larger work. As scholars like Frances Yates have shown, this practice has its roots in Greek and Roman antiquity, and developed adherents among the late Renaissance occultists and humanists of Shakespeare’s lifetime, including Matteo Ricci, Giordano Bruno, and Robert Fludd. (According to a recent NPR broadcast from March 2017 on “Super Memorizers,” the practice is still in use among a handful of “memory champions” who are increasingly the subject of neuroscientific interest and study.) In 887, the stage itself transforms into Lepage’s private memory theatre, translat- ing between virtual and physical reality, recalling to his mind not so much the text of the poem itself, but its months-long process of memorization. As Lepage labors to get the poem right, an entire personal and political history of associa- tions unfolds, beginning with and circling back to his childhood home at 887 Murray Avenue (Apartment 5) in Québec City.

The first of many such topoi on his mnemonic journey, the building where young Robert grew up, springs into view onstage in the form of a life-sized dollhouse with digital screens for windows depicting interior goings-on and dramas. Its inhabitants are an image of Québec’s population in miniature, he tells us, before we embark on a circuitous exploration of the city as it has intersected his life. The journey takes us to the Parc de Braves, where a young Robert once heard Charles de Gaulle cry out “Vivre Québec Libre,” to his childhood living room where he learned of the emergence of the separatist Front de Libération du Qué- bec from the nightly news, to his current apartment on the Boulevard Louis XIV where he confronts his own mortality in a comic discussion of “cold cuts.” More and more memories flood the stage, crowding in at one another’s heels: the JFK assassination, a visit to the drama conservatory where he trained as a student, and perhaps most movingly, a childhood game of shadow puppetry played with his sister, the personal roots of Lepage’s lifelong fascination with the theatre.

Using every possible scenic device—life-sized sets, toys, onstage cameras, doll- houses, machines, projections—the pathway through Lepage’s memory and the fractious history of Québec in the later half of the twentieth century take shape before the audience’s very eyes. Throughout, Lepage reveals himself to be a genial

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 and engaging memoirist, and a proficient actor in his own right. He often cuts an unexpectedly bashful or self-deprecating figure onstage, making jokes at his own expense, in a way that can only surprise the spectator familiar with his work’s typically maximalist approach. Although he spares none of the tricks of the trade in 887, the production unfolds on a smaller and more intimate scale than anything he has presented in New York in recent memory.

The work wanders at times, perhaps as befits a meditation on the spatial nature of memory, though sometimes seeming uncertain of how to find its way. Eventually, 887 comes to center upon Lepage’s memories of his father—a taxi driver with mnemonic tricks of his own, needed for internalizing the map of the city prior to the development of modern GPS—and it finds a climax in the younger Lep- age’s dynamic, impassioned performance of Lalonde’s poem, which crystallizes the violence of Québec’s linguistic divisions into a powerful cri de coeur. Along the way, despite his penchant for elaborate mechanical stage wizardry, Lepage sometimes makes the most impressive theatrical magic out of relatively simple means. At one moment, the stage transforms into the counter at an old-time diner: as its neon lights turn on one-by-one so the scene can begin, a lemonade machine comes alive in full view of the audience, flooding the playing space with shimmering, liquid, electric yellow light. It is an immensely evocative moment, moving in a way that almost defies description, and it hits home as an eloquent visual and chromatic metaphor for the nostalgia and melancholy Lepage threads throughout the evening.

Thankfully, Lepage does not offer any easy answers about the ultimately mysterious nature of memory, or about how it might be most useful for building the more harmonious world he clearly desires. As in L’Amour de loin, however, 887 poses another question about technology and time. Lepage’s program note observes that 887’s interest in memory cuts against the threat of “oblivion, the unconscious, [the] memory that fades over time, and whose limits are compen- sated for by digital storage, mountains of data, and virtual memory.” Plato’s Phaedrus reminds us that the ancients who developed the earliest technologies of writing feared that it would vitiate the power of the human mind to remember at all: how does technology today enable, deteriorate, or otherwise transform our relationship to the past, and what role does theatre have to play, in our digital present, to preserve our histories? Lepage’s cabinet of curiosities refrains from facile solutions, but poses these questions to linger in the spectator’s mind.

If L’Amour de Loin situated its characters in the place of a spatial distance, high- lighting a sense of anxious futurity as they anticipate their impending meeting, 887 fixates instead primarily on temporal distance, the significance and dif-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00378 by guest on 24 September 2021 ficulties of recalling the past. Although the two productions could hardly have been more dissimilar in mood or outward appearance, they amounted to two of Robert Lepage’s most impressive, moving works in recent years, and to a match- ing, Janus-faced set of reflections on technology and time. Let’s hope there will be more opportunities to find ourselves in the interim between past and future with Lepage in seasons still to come.

JOSEPH CERMATORI is assistant professor of modern and contemporary drama in the English department at Skidmore College. He is also a con- tributing editor and staff writer at PAJ, where he has written essays on theatre, music, and opera. He contributes regular theatre criticism to The Village Voice and has also published on theatre and performance in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times. He is currently at work on a book about baroque avant-gardes in European and American theatre and aesthetic theory from 1875–1945.

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