ABSTRACT
Robert Lepage is one of the world’s foremost theatre directors and is widely regarded as a key contemporary performance visionary. He is a director, playwright/deviser, actor and multimedia artist whose performance practice combines various artistic forms, traditions and cultures. Lepage’s theatre connects a number of important late twentieth and early twenty-first century performance practitioners, such as Jacques Lecoq, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch and Laurie Anderson. Lepage’s real influence lies in his creative process rather than the product, regardless of its accomplishment. Growing up in Quebec City in the 1960s and 1970s, Lepage felt the powerful impacts of clerical nationalism, conservative ideology and the dominance of white French Catholics over all aspects of life, in particular family and cultural politics. The motivation to explore language as sound is an outcome of the cultural politics of Quebec’s linguistic isolation, as well as Lepage’s reclusive personality.
