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Thank you. Thank you very much. Something Tony did not mention at the beginning: I also saw King Lear. The Stratford was a wonderful production, but I only saw it once. So it’s a great pleasure being here this afternoon. When I was asked to come and deliver this talk, I very, very naturally agreed to do it because the theme of identity and the theme of belonging have always been central to my work as an artist for the past 35 years. I’ve done many things, as Adrienne so eloquently said. I’ve done a lot of work in opera, circus, film, but my main world is the theatre world. And I have worked there as an actor, as a director mainly, and also as a writer. And as a writer, actually we work in a collective manner. I work with artists from all over the world, so most of our work is not just Quebec-based, it’s also in many languages and we get to co-produce with festivals and theatre companies from around the world. The very first big collective show that did that propelled my work into the international spectrum was a show called The Dragon’s Trilogy, which explored, of course, our relationship with the Chinese communities of Canada, and it was a show that lasted—it was a six-hour show and it was worth every minute of it, and it kind of spanned over 75 years. Later on, we devised another piece called The Seven Streams of the River Ota, mainly about the 50 years that followed the Hiroshima tragedy. This one was more about displacement, how populations and individuals were displaced by the war, whether the war with the Japanese or the Second World War in Europe. So this one was a seven-hour show. And then we devised a nine-hour show—they just get longer as we go—called Lipsynch, which was a study on identity connected to the theme of voice, speech, and language, which of course is a theme that we will be discussing today during this talk. 12th LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium featuring Robert Lepage 10.18.2014 PAGE 1 Also, I’ve been very busy doing one-man shows. You know, in the midst of doing all these collective writings, I’ve done many solo shows that I’ve been performing myself. And they’re all pretty much autofiction, even though I’m too chicken to actually use my own name in these, and I usually call myself Philippe or find some other name. But actually, they’re very autobiographical, and a lot of those stories are about how you find your identity elsewhere, either because you can’t really find it in your own community or that you feel that you have to go and hide somewhere to understand who you are. And of course, you’re not really hiding from anybody because you’re converted to somebody else’s culture and to somebody else’s society or identity. So that’s pretty much what my work is about, and I’m pretty much obsessed by these themes of identity and belonging. I started to be—I’d say I tried to remember and go as far back as I could of when I started to be interested in about that specific thing of belonging, and it had to do with when I came out of the conservatory. I was brought up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’m from the generation in Quebec City where people were kind of forced to speak English as a second language, but there was not really any use for it. I didn’t see how—you know, there was nothing practical about speaking English when you were brought up in Quebec City. And it was in, you know, the great years of nationalism and sovereignty and separatism in Quebec, so of course that was an interesting project. And so, if you were a 20-year old Quebecois Francophone that travelled, you didn’t feel you belonged to a place called Canada: you were a Quebecker and that was it. And you know, I’d say that a lot of people, a lot of my friends, we discussed this and nobody would actually feel Canadian. And I got to do my first trip to Europe, backpacking, and I remember one day going to the Piazza San Marco in Venice and came across these two, this couple, who also were backpacking from Edmonton, Alberta, and I knew they were Canadian because they had small Canadian flags on their backpacks. And we were queueing for the same museum or something; I don’t know what it was exactly. And of course, you say, “Oh, you’re from Canada. Where are you from? What part of Canada?” And you start talking, and we kind of became friends, and that evening we went out for drinks and met with other people, Italians and people from Germany. And I realized that I was part of a reality that I had never felt I was part of before, and I was introduced to them by these two people as fellow Canadians, and it felt right, which was kind of odd. So it was the first time that I felt really Canadian, that I could actually identify to something called Canada. And it always remained—and it’s still quite mysterious to this day and I hope that these forums could help clarify what this is about. But I say there, “Okay, why is it that I don’t feel Canadian when I’m in Canada and I feel Canadian when I’m abroad?” And so, it’s a bit of an odd feeling, but at the same time it kind of gives you hope that, you know, in this world of Arabs and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, black and white, whatever the conflicts are, whatever the paradoxes are, it means that if Martians were to attack us, we’d all be Earthlings, you know? We’d all feel that we’re part of the same place. And that was kind of confirmed to me by Guy Laliberté, who is the big boss at Cirque du Soleil who actually got to go in outer space and visited the space station because he’s a multi-billionaire, so he could afford flying there. And he went there for ten days and he said, “It’s really the feeling that you have because you’re so outside of all the different cultural barriers or identifications and that you feel—everybody in the shuttle or in the space station, whether they’re Russian or Taikonauts, Cosmonauts, Astronauts, they’re all Earthlings. And I know that, you know, we can’t all experiment that and actually go out there and say, “Oh, we’re actually all from the same place,” but there is something about that phenomenon that intrigued me and kind of forced me to acknowledge it and to explore that theme. When my work started to be exported and I started to do more and more touring, I was asked a lot to either deliver lectures or to do seminars for a couple of days with some theatre students or with, you know, in theatre festivals, where there would be people from all over the place. And of course, if you’re going to spend a couple of days devising a short piece of work, you want to know who it is that you’re working with. And a way to do that is I would always kind of unroll a very long roll of paper on the floor and I’d put some markers and crayons, and I’d say, “Okay, we’re going to draw a map of the world,” and so people would spend about half an hour. We’d play music and they would draw a map of the world. 12th LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium featuring Robert Lepage 10.18.2014 PAGE 2 And anywhere this would happen, any country of the world where I did this, they would always put the Americas in the centre, right? Of course, Europe would be on this side and Asia and Australia would be on this side. And I would always be amazed, even if there were no Americans in the room, how everybody knew exactly how the United States was shaped. You know, the Panhandle of Florida, and they all knew where Miami was and where Cuba was, and of course, even Australia. But when they got to draw Canada, they would go up north and then there was this blob and it would just kind of go, and go this way, you know? And I was, “My God, nobody knows anything about what this country looks like, and they can map a small island in the Pacific and they don’t know anything about this huge, important country which is called Canada.” And most of them thought that, of course, the capital of Canada was Montreal, and they would place Montreal in the middle of the blob, where Sault Ste. Marie is. And I would always be, you know, a bit embarrassed that I came from a place nobody knew anything about. And one day, because on top, not only did they have to draw a map of the world, but they were allowed to make comments, little arrows and little comments they would write, and some jokes, and you could see politically where they were and you could see what they thought of what was going on in the world today.

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