Cultural Olympiad: Robert Lepage takes a small story and makes it visionary

February 5, 2010, Peter Birnie, Vancouver Sun

The Blue Dragon

VANCOUVER—Pierre Lamontagne is a man riddled with questions. Hey, just like Robert Lepage! 

The latest Lepage spectacle is, as with all his personal projects, an intensely self-absorbed piece of work. In fact, Lepage’s performance as his fictional creation, transplanted Quebec artist Lamontagne, is a full-circle return to one of his first navel-gazing creations — Pierre was last seen almost a quarter-century ago in The Dragon Trilogy.

That was in Canada. In The Blue Dragon, Lamontagne is now an expat in Shanghai who finds himself caught between the old world of a long-ago marriage to a Quebec woman of his own age, and the brave new-world experience of a fling with a much younger Chinese photographer.

Speaking softly, with no big stick to beat the audience, Lepage-as-Lamontagne offers no clear solutions to his mid-life mix of blues and ennui. Pity those poor audience members who can’t stand such ambiguity; the rest of us can relish another subtle example of the fact that no one tells a simple story about complex people with more beauty.

The Blue Dragon is a small show by Lepage standards, but that still means a mechanical tour de force is on offer at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Kudos to both the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts for bringing this jewel box production to full fruition. The stage is stacked to resemble two wide containers, which are then opened up in the typically amazing ways we’ve come to expect from Lepage and his Ex Machina theatre company. Tableaux flow by along the full width of the stage, or individual areas are highlighted by lighting and/or screens.

Endless effects complement what is merely clever, such as the wide-but-shallow space that’s a perfect fit for Lamontagne’s cramped up-and-down Shanghai partment. When the women go for a bicycle ride along the Huangpu River, for example, their very real one-speed push-bikes shift along a track before another track containing moving miniatures of river traffic and a backdrop of the buildings of the Bund.

The artist’s calligraphy flows from his pen to appear on screens behind, or it’s simply splashed via video when he takes a mop to a wall. Noisy bar, crowded airport or wintry street, all are created in an instant through never-ending trickery by a team of technicians that’s four times as big as the cast.

Lepage is of course an easy fit inside his own creation. Tai Wei Foo also has a nicely real feel to her young, pretty and pretty confused Chinese artist (also tossing off some gorgeous Chinese dancing), while I wish I understood French for the French-language presentations of this piece (there were two of them, both sold out) so that actress Marie Michaud’s heavily accented English didn’t have me thinking, “Why not just speak French to Pierre, eh?”

That aside, Michaud’s work is still both suitably understated and riddled with the bigger symbolic gestures (when her character drinks, she really has to drain that glass) that help elevate any Lepage storyline from deliberately mundane to decidedly memorable. There is so much detail to the script in these barely perceptible ways that, in league with all the broad mechanical effort of the stagecraft, a wholly satisfying experience unfolds.

 
 
 
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