ABSTRACT
Robert Lepage’s practice can be seen in the tradition of ‘director’s theatre’. Like Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson and Elizabeth LeCompte, Lepage is a director-author of performance. In the course of the twentieth century, the mise-en-scène became redefined as an independent artistic element, a vehicle of theatricality rather than simply an extension of the text. The director became author of the mise-en-scène, and the mise-en-scène a separate artistic expression from the written text. Lepage may start from an existing text, as in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, but it is ultimately the collective process of discovery through rehearsals, not a pre-defined concept, which determines the performance vision and the outcome.
