 It's academic, and it's theater, the place where they both can be. You have law, youth, and practice, and third-party. Visual practice, historical practice, and social practice. Examples of women sharing what it is that you do, sharing how you do that. There's no way you can ignore lack of knowledge anymore. What time is it now? Can you help? It started out about different people and about different things. A whole sea of drama, theater for everybody, yes, everybody. That's what's really done. That's what's really done. And indeed my understanding of life relationships has already changed. So welcome everybody to the Martin E. Segal Theater Center here at the Graduate Center. CUNYs, thank you all for taking time out in your busy life. It's getting closer to the Christmas time. I know how it is in New York, but to come to us. Share an evening. We really take pride in what we do and the presentation is really from all around the world. But once in a while we feel it's an even more special evening than all the other ones. And I think one of them is today and tonight we have with us the great Robert LePage, who's over there, who is working in New York City at the moment at the Met Opera. So we will talk a bit about it. I don't know how it happened. There was a lapse in the time warp or something, but it happened that he could come to us for an hour, an hour and a half. And it's really, really, really great honor for us to have him here in the world of chess. We have now two chess masters, Grand Masters playing by Robert LePage. He's a grand master of theater. And his extraordinary work, his also big output, as I think Susan Sontack said it, you see a great master in any field. You see also about the amount of output, creative work that's been done. It's stunning. And today we got a little insight in it. We saw him perform in a film. He also directed The Dark Side of the Moon. That also was a theater play before. And then a film he directed, Traptyk. We saw The Image Mill, a great projection project in the city of Quebec for celebrating 400 years, which he created. So, and this is just truly a little insight into his work. So I really encourage you all to go and see his work. He's going to come to BAM, next to the opera, of course, which will be here. Next spring he will be here. And we hope to inspire you, but also learn a bit from him about what it means to be an artist, why we do theater, why we tell stories, and what we do. And truly it's a great privilege to be in the same space, in the same room with Robert LePage and instead of seeing something just on the screen or something. So this is why his theater is so fantastic. The Segal Center bridges academia and professional theater, international and American theater. And this right fits in what we do. And if you look a little bit at our lineup as it fits in the voices from all around the world, we often feel we don't hear enough from Canada. We don't hear enough also from the great region of Quebec. It's so close. It's much closer sometimes and a better right to Pittsburgh or Washington. Still, the voices don't come over here and something has happened. We mentioned it before, perhaps after 9-11. But this is, we are really neighbors and we need to, especially after the last week's events, we really know how important it is to listen, to be close and to be inclusive and to open it up. And we will also talk a little bit about the Art Center, Le Diamant, which Robert is creating in Quebec that hopefully might also help to bridge what is so close, but somehow seems also a distance. Quebec's playwrights, we just had them also here, three of them, very good plays. They are sometimes better known in Paris or in London or Berlin. Then they are here in New York and it's just a shocking and it shouldn't be like this. We also would like to thank very much SEAD, the Centre des Écrivains Artistiques, Tramatique, if I said it right, who really helped us. Also, we really want to thank you and Emmanuel had her helping hands to get Robert also with us. And Emmanuel was a visiting scholar a year and a half ago, two years ago at the Segal Theatre Center and so this also helped us to open up and she hopefully liked her time here and said, you know, I could maybe help you to bring some more playwrights and others over here. So thank you so much. The format of the evening will be Emmanuel will give us a little overview. Again, it's an excerpt of the work of Robert LaPage. So we know a little bit more what he's doing. Then we will have a talk, mostly we will listen to Robert and then we have a really also a good amount of time reserved for a question, a Q&A with the audience. We need good theatre but we also need a really good audience and I think you are a great audience. Often we have, you know, good people here and smart people here. So this is an open dialogue and thank you again all for coming and I now ask Emmanuel to give us a bit more insight in the work of Robert. Thank you. Hello. First of all, I would like to thank the Segal Center again and highlight their amazing work, especially when it comes to creating bridges between the academic and performing arts communities. My name is Emmanuel Sirrois. I am currently the advisor and curator for international projects at the Centre des hauteurs dramatique, CEAD, Playwright Center based in Montreal. I feel very, very honored to introduce Robert LaPage Theatre tonight. Like most theatre artists and theorists of my generation, I discovered Robert LaPage in the early 2000s. For many of us, the encounter with his shows was significant because they are astonishing, impressively beautiful, but also because it has allowed the generation of francophone québécois to dream, breathe and tell their stories outside of ideological discourses on identities and project themselves in the world. Robert LaPage is a very prolific, multidisciplinary artist born in the city of Québec. He first made his mark at the theatre as author, director and actor in a collective called Repaire. He has created numerous projects, among which they are Vinci, The Dragon Trilogy, The Needles and Opium, The Seven Streams of the Riviera Auta, The Far Side of the Moon, The Geometry of Miracles and The Anderson Project, to name a few. One of the most important cultural figures on the international scene, Robert LaPage has also explored cinema, museum exhibitions, rock shows and opera's circus multimedia projects such as Bibliothèque Library as virtual exploration of 10 of the world's most fascinating libraries and the Image Mail, a huge outdoors historical multimedia show. His works have been translated into several languages and sometimes contain more than one at a time on stage. It is a question of taking languages also as artistic object. He reminded us during an interview and staged them in order to make them resonate differently, to divert objects from their function, to find a poetic charge and to reveal the infinite ambiguity of the world by games of transparency, constantly renewed. I felt this poetic charge the first time when I saw The Far Side of the Moon and fatal when I saw Quills, his production on the Marquitsade where multiple mirrors were used to transition from one scene to another and also to come from the spectator with his own monster. Just like Saade did his outrageous characters, I felt this powerful rush more recently with 887, his last performance where, in my opinion, miniature models highlighted the fragility of memory. Ludovic Fouquet tell us in a book on Robert LaPage, The Horizon in Images, that his work is in perpetual invention and evolution. This is especially due to his ability to integrate other forms of art, such as photography, cinema, video and music. But this is also embodied in the unfolding and recombination of DNA, the process of creation, itself often composed from improvisation. Creation from Contest is also important in the LaPage Theatre. He said it is the paradoxes in the work of Da Vinci that first interested him. The contradictions and the duality in The Far Side of the Moon is reflected in the incongruities of the Anderson Project's constant opposition between the past and the present. In 887, the narrative unfolds by creating relations between his own life and the history of Quebec. The light of LaPage creativity emerged from the thoughtful construction or reconstructions of the tensions that plague us today. In this way, LaPage's approach itself offers a series of mutating contrasts which provide a rich source of contemporary inspiration. It is often said of LaPage that he is a master of the theatre of images and unfold technology within his mise en scène. But the use of technology remains motivated, first of all by the meaning of the narrative and a high degree sensitivity to the various forms by which it can be expressed. As he himself explained in an interview with the playwright Carol Fréchette at the beginning of 1987, I have no shyness in integrating technology. It opens paths and constitutes a new language. Like what Fouquet tells us, the past thinking evolves from the theoretical space to the theoretical image, an image understood as the surface of representation. From the fusion of the viewer's gaze and the theoretical thought of the creator, there is developed during the show a shared language that gives an enrichment to the stage within unprecedented semantics. These enriching semantics span not just on the stage, but also, as I want to suggest, the trajectory and cultural store of innovation. LaPage has bequealed to us. They touch on every element of what, and the broadest sense can be thought contemporary, dramaturgy. Other important dimensions of LaPage's work are undoubtedly the journey, the call of mystery and the aesthetics of ambiguity. Ambiguity has a dramaturgic power, the passage from one place to another, metaphorically speaking, but also in terms of the scenographic strategies employed and the mutations from one referential framework to another. In this sense, I want to highlight just one of LaPage's most recent projects, namely his creation of a unique cultural venue, Le Diamant, located in Quebec City and dedicated to the presentation of local and international creations. It will be a variable geometric venue that will accommodate shows with large deployments in an intimate setting, the diamond Le Diamant. The name of this place offers us a gateway into the dense work of LaPage. He takes in cultural resources, not in the matter of appropriation, but in the matter of disdaining their constitutive horizon, deconstructing their narrative spaces and strategies and ambiguously recombining, recoding their positions, not only for the local audience, but no less for international audience. Indeed, beside the fact of being multi-faceted, the main property of the diamonds is its work on light. The diamond can reflect light, refract, decompose or disperse it. If a beam of white light is projected through a diamond and if a screen is placed in front of the red fractured rays, one can see a display of color similar to that of the sky. I very sincerely thank Robert Le Page for his audacity, his finesse and his light, and I wish you a very nice evening. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming and thank you, Emmanuel, for giving us a little overview. I think from the images in the back, you could just see a bit of that stunning theater. This is just the visual material without the connection to the narrative, which is so significant also in your work. So, Robert, first of all, again, really thank you for coming. It really means the world. It's a great pleasure being here. It really means the world for us. What are you working on at the moment? Well, I'm in New York for a few weeks because we are restaging a production of l'amour de loin by Kaya Sarrao. It's a contemporary piece of opera that was created in the year 2000. And so, I'm saying we're restaging because it's a co-production between my company, Ex Machina, and The Met. We've been doing this through a few projects. The stuff we present here at The Met is co-produced by our small company in Quebec City. And so, we're doing this... It's starting the 1st of December, so there's still a lot of tickets left. And it's a very, very exciting project. She's a writer, a composer from Finland, and the bretto was written by Amin Malouf, which is one of the great French Lebanese writers who are very much interested and obsessed by the idea of crusades and, of course, the Arab world versus the Western world. So it's quite a wonderful piece of music and of narrative, actually. So how does it feel being a Quebecois artist in New York working? Do you feel at home? Yes, I feel at home because the Quebecois culture is... I think it's difficult to define exactly what it is because we're Francophones. Most of us are Francophones in Quebec. It's the French-speaking province of Quebec, though there are other French-speaking people across Canada. But French is pretty much the basis of what distinguishes Quebec's culture. But also because of our French past, because they once were people from France who founded Canada, and eventually the Brits came and kicked them out. But we remained French in Quebec. So we've adopted the British view and the British way of life. So we're French from France. We're British. We're part of the British Empire. But we're also very American because we're next door neighbors and we're part of North America. And we were all brought up by... At least in the 20th century, Quebec artists have watched Batman and Bewitched. I mean, we're a complete American television culture. So our way of life is very, very American. And I think that for a long time that was probably a bit of a complex thing to express when you don't really know who you are. And with time, I think Quebecers understood that it was actually a plus. There was something there in the fact that we're a very young nation where everything, very young culture, where everything is to be defined and determined. So there's a lot of space for artists who want to experiment and contribute to try to find what is Quebec identity. And so it's a very, very, I think, very open-minded and very open. And because of the fact that we speak French and this sea of English-speaking people in North America and within our own country, because we're a minority in a certain sense because there's, for 34, 35 million Canadians, maybe eight to nine million of them speak French. So in order to survive that, we have to create a kind of a star system within our own borders in Quebec. But if we want to export our culture, there is a language barrier. So of course we go to France and our poets and writers and singers go to France a lot and go to French-speaking countries like Belgium and many other countries. But if we want to come to the US or if we want to be part of the world stage, the French language is a barrier. So what do you do besides cert titles? So that's why there's a very highly visual and physical theater dance culture in Quebec and certainly Circus. C'est du Soleil is a québécois product. I'd say now, but pretty much a... Because I think that in the 70s and the 80s there was this consciousness in Quebec that if you wanted to be part of the world, if you wanted to be part of the world, if you wanted to be part of the dialogue with the rest of the world, French would sometimes be... As much as it's part of our culture, it's also an obstacle. So we've developed a theater that's more imagistic, physical, more about energy movement. So there's a lot of expertise that was developed in Quebec. A lot of the new high-tech developments come from Quebec more and more. So there's this thing that happened that made our culture much more... I'd say not multi-media, but pluridisciplinary in order to survive. Yeah, it is really true. And also the work in 360 and VR and the domes you have. The great Italian film director and writer Pasolini, who I admire also very much, he once said, you want to be an artist, you have to throw your body into life. It's dangerous, and for him actually it was very, very dangerous. And most probably, as it comes out now, was killed by the police. But you, in a way, you also took your life. You threw it into theater. Why did you choose theater? Why... Because you were moving so many articles. Well, because it was the only thing around I mean, of course, now film is more affordable. I mean, there's actually some amazing film directors coming out of Quebec now, and there are other means of expression, of course. But I'd say that theater was the poor man's expression in the 60s, certainly in the 70s. People who could not afford writing a novel and finding a publisher would write a play. Somebody who could not afford doing film because it's too expensive or whatever would produce a play. So the play is a kind of... Theater was a kind of a refuge place, at least in French-speaking Canada, for all the people who wanted to do something else in life. But theaters seemed to offer a quick pass to have access to the audiences. And certainly my interest in theater did not come from theater. It came from theatricality. And what I mean by that is that theater was, when I was very young, was something for the bourgeoisie. And my family wasn't part of the bourgeoisie. We were not a poor family, but we weren't a family that could afford going to the theater. So the only theater that I would be in contact with was rock theater. There was theatrical rock, or there was a... When Pina Bausch came about, it was dance theater. She pretty much coined that dance theater thing. And suddenly people like Laurie Anderson and the whole performing arts clique of New York who would be visual artists or music artists who would use theatricality to get their stories across. So I was very interested in the fact that theater was not just something that was used by theater people. And actually the people who used theater and who were not actors or not writers were much more interesting storytellers, well, to my taste. So I was always very interested in theatricality, not thinking that theater would actually be my thing. But I remained a member seeing the first, you know, the early days of progressive rock where you would have people like Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant and Genesis who would come on stage and they'd be dressed as characters, medieval characters, and they'd have sets. And the songs weren't crafted for these two-minute-and-a-half on the radio. You'd have 25-minute-long stories with characters and dialogue. And it was all this thing. So I remember being brought up when I was a very young teenager. I'd go to see these rock shows and put on these amazing plays, basically. And, of course, one of the most influential one was Peter Gabriel, who was the lead singer of Genesis at the time and who would work with Mask and who would actually do a lot of mime and pantomime. And so all of that pulled me towards the aesthetics of theater. Of course, I was very disappointed when I was auditioned for the conservatory in Quebec City. I was accepted. Of course, all these people would do as an actor. And I was a bit disappointed because nobody was doing Peter Gabriel stuff. I was 17 and I was going, you know, we have to learn these long racine things and check off, for God's sakes, you know. So, and a lot of very almost melodramatic, you know, theater that was hyper naturalistic stuff that I wasn't interested at all. So anyway, so I put myself through the theater school and almost got kicked out three times because all the time I spent there I would spend more time trying to follow what directors were doing or set designers were doing or any invited teacher would be more interested because they would come in with their aesthetics and their ideas and their, so the teachers wanted to kick me out because I wouldn't spend enough time working on my acting and I'd be too much interested in doing sounded thing or whatever was available at the time. So when I came out of theater school I was sure that, you know, I would never have a career. So I never tried to have a career and I didn't have any ambition to be either an actor or I was just more interested in any kind of craft that was around theater. So that's why I got interested in directing but at the same time designing and why not write a bit and why not direct and why not maybe act a bit. You know, so I never put myself through any auditions or tried to, you know, have an answering machine at home in case some agent would call and, you know, that thing, that reality didn't belong to me. I was much more into trying to create some kind of event. That was my thing. So you kind of equated a collective. You were a bunch of friends? Pretty much because, well, I've always been a very, very shy person and the paradox, of course, you know, I don't know why we put ourselves, we paint ourselves in the corner all the time because we were very shy and we ended up being, you know, the spokesperson for a group or the director or the leader of a band or whatever, so the shy people always end up in front. But what I liked about theater is that I had tried all sorts of other disciplines before, you know, arts, music and all that and it was very, very exposing because you would be standing there with your classical guitar and you'd have to play and, you know, you'd be very exposed but theater was a great thing because it was a gang, you know, it was a bunch of people and you could hide behind the group but still be part of the thing, still be creative and if ever it flopped, well, it was the director's fault, you know. He'd take the flag but you were part of the group in the event and all that. So I kind of... So that's why I wasn't... So that's why the collective thing and the idea of doing a lot of collective creation which was very in at that time for me it was quite interesting because you could hide within that you didn't have any real responsibility. You had, you know, the group had a responsibility so you could, you know, exchange and but there was a lot of compromise though. That's the only frustrating part of creative, you know, you'd be sitting around saying, okay, we're doing a show about war so we all agree that war is not a good thing but of course we all came from different backgrounds and we all had, you know, different social classes and some of us were men, some of us were women, you know, we had so many things that we were so different so of course you'd have to put a lot of water in your wine all the time because that's not really what you want to say but of course if we say my way it's going to frustrate this person and this person is not going to feel representative so anyways this whole creation collective thing became a bit of a bore because it's nice to see a group of people trying to express something but if it's a half-baked idea it's of no interest so I was struggling for a long time to try to find a way to continue to work in a collective way but that the work would not be a compromise that actually the addition or the combination of different creators would actually be a plus and not a watered-down version of the thing so that took a while before I met the right people and that I understood that there were maybe other ways of working collectively I like very much the idea if I understood right from the very first film we showed the backside of the moon where basically you play almost like a schizophrenic character like two brothers, one who is the weatherman and you know doesn't even have to tell the truth and people like all seems easy and the other guy who struggles he writes a paper but doesn't get it done and it's about cosmology and about space and how to get out there and at the very end you can obviously see that he doesn't really get to do what he wants to do he makes a little film as a message for extraterrestrial life so they understand what he gets chosen so the idea that the artist actually aims to something that goes out to space and is not tied to gravity and that is that you are a cosmonaut he said, do I see that right? Yeah, the thing is that of course when I write the far side of the moon I never wrote the far side of the moon I improvised it until it dried and became a script I guess but the thing that I kind of discovered that as I was going along that there was two sides to me there was a side that was very much about integrity and message and purity and being sincere about stuff and being idealistic and the other side of me who was a showman who was interested in showing off and how do you reconcile that so it's a show about reconciliation so it's about reconciliation the Americans and the Russians and then eventually becomes about reconciling these two brothers but it was mainly something about reconciling these two things within me about how do you we have very paradoxal personalities or artists we see our contradictions as problems but actually they're a rich source of inspiration you know and I understood that only when I got to doing the far side of the moon and my interest was much more about the looking outward and trying to understand what's up there and you know is there some form of life but not just the extraterrestrial thing is there a God up there for me the thought was much deeper than that but it's a scary thought and it gives you a vertigo you become very dizzy if you're only looking upwards so there has to be a part of you that also digs into the ground and is looking for a basis and something that will make you understand what goes on on earth so we're always kind of navigating between these two points so for me it was a very liberating moment in my work where I understood that I could be an idealist and a dreamer but at the same time you're being very down to earth so do you do you have a message to give I mean Jack Warner the film famously said this is for Western Union and not for us but one feels you are communicating for me what's important is that artists in general of course you want to have a large audience and you want to be understood by as many people for personal satisfaction to feel that you're not alone with your little tragedy or whatever but also because there's more money to be made if you have a big audience and a small audience so for me what was important was to do something to embark on something that would be as many people as possible and to that people call that international theater everybody wants to be an international theater artist and they want to be renowned internationally that's a false path to follow what you want to do, you want to do something that's universal and for me the big difference is that if you want to be international write in English make stuff where change the names of of in the story make sure that it takes place in a standard place that everybody recognizes but that's like a wrong path what you have to do is that you have to talk about what goes on in your own kitchen speak about what you know and what you know is your very banal local life be extremely local and the more local you are the more universal you are and that took a while for me to understand that when I started doing that it started to work out people started to get it and it explains why at the Cannes Film Festival it's always the Iranian film that gets the palm of the door you know why is it that you see a film that takes place in Tehran and where it's a completely different set of values than our society it's a completely different country some women are veiled the rules are not the same people don't speak the same language as we do they have a different history it's so radically different yet we cry and we feel and we recognize ourselves in their stories so what is it so the more local your story is the more sincere the more you know what you are talking about you're not putting on a show about something some other people's reality whatever not that you should not be interested in other people's stories but what I'm saying is that the more it's about you you're going to have a large audience so when I kind of understood that then I could understand that when you tell a story in French the word story is the same word as history we say histoire l'histoire is history une histoire is a story for me I always say you have to combine histoire with a small H a low case H I think you say in English and histoire with a capital H and the two echo each other so when I work with a group of actors and we develop a story or when I work on a solo show I'm never preoccupied by the capital H I trust that it will be there so I talk about the small history I talk about my history about my local stuff about my life in general and it's really banal and of no interest but I do that and that I know very well I know my life story I know the story of my parents I know my friends stories my close friends I know very very clearly why this happened and whatever so I talk about that and it's almost melodramatic and it's of no interest but I trust that if I do it well and if I sculpt it well that eventually there's a larger thing which is history with a capital H that appears but you can't force that you can't say oh I'm going to do this and people will be thinking of this historical event that happened in this story of humanity it'll kind of show up by itself so when I started touring it'll show like far side of the moon which is a very melodramatic story you know two brothers the father's dead the mother just died they have to find they're very different they have to find a way to reconcile very banal and you play this story in a place like Korea and they go wild they love this thing it's a huge huge event in Seoul of course for them two brothers who are very different who try to reconcile it talks to them in a completely different way that's beyond your command beyond your power the only thing you can do is to continue talking about this you know very banal story of you and your brother so that's why I'm interested in that and that can only happen if your work travels if it's exposed to other audiences if people abroad inject their own reality in what you do and if you take that and you re-inject it into your into your piece we did a piece, a very early piece called Dragon's Trilogy and it was a bifrontal show when we had sand and we had bifrontal it was very important in those days to do bifrontal stuff so we did this bifrontal show and there was a moment where we were trying to express the second world war with marines and army people who had skating skates and they would do this kind of thing in the sand and eventually it became the war because we had all these shoes and they were crushing the shoes anyways it was very devastating scene and the dry sand would start to go up in clouds and it was very, very effective metaphor for what was going on in the war while these lovers were actually skating around in couples and whatever and in Poland when we did this in Poland it was a huge thing and that scene was like people were crying and we were wondering why it was such a big thing for them and they say well because we know what it is to have to be attacked on both fronts for suddenly the bifrontal thing had a reason why it was there it had a meaning so that's what I mean to say your work is informed by all these things that you don't have any idea and that you don't have any experience and you don't have any intention and you have to take it in and learn from that and say okay that's why the work is universal because there's a place for these things to happen for people it's not something I commanded it's not something I envisioned it's there and your work has to be available for other people to make it resonate with their own stories and their own humanity yeah I you just also now used what to sculpt it and I think in the image mill you use the example of the innovative sculptor who has a stone and he feels it's already inside is that how you feel that's how I describe it is it already there for example 30-40 people here today let's say we do a collective thing of course it would take more time than if we were 5 or 6 around a table but still let's say we do a collective thing even before we start there's a story right now that's under these boards here there's a show it already exists it has lines it has characters it's a subject matter that already exists and what exists is the combination of every people's experience and sensibility and sensitivity or it exists so what we do what my job would be to try to do all these different explorations and improvs and games and whatever to try to scratch the surface of this floor and eventually we would find like archeologists oh there's a line here between this person here and that person there there's a connection and we continue but we don't know what it is but it's like archeology you know you just kind of dig and suddenly you do a little 10 by 10 square and you see that there's a wheel kind of vehicle whatever we don't know what the vehicle is and then somebody else finds a little thing there and then after only a few a few digs we could see the whole ship we didn't have to dig the whole thing we just by a few hands we okayed this and then all the connections happen so I believe in that approach and the thing about the Inuit sculpture is that that's how Inuit or Eskimo sculptures were not all they don't all do Eskimo hunting scenes in soap stones for the tourists you know they have this kind of respect of they take a whale bone and it would be just there by the shore and they believe that the bone has a story there's a sculpture already in it they believe in that and they just leave it there and eventually the sun goes down and the light rays the sun rays are in a certain angle that suddenly on the surface they see there's a forest there and you can see the forest very well you can see it except for people to see it at other times of the day they have to help it so they kind of just help it they just do it as little interventions as they can on the bone so then you see the forest and then some other day it starts raining and the bone some parts become darker and some parts some parts remain pale and then you see oh there's an animal in the forest there look at that and you can see an animal with some antlers whatever and they help that animal express itself but they don't say oh I have an idea I'm going to do an animal with some antlers it's a nice forest and they take this and they don't do that they just respect what that thing but of course they're the ones seeing this and it is an expression of the people who sculpt it but they respect the basic material so that's how I see collective creation or even solo shows that's what I do I start with something and I play around with it and eventually to this whole world that was just waiting for us to kind of help it and just kind of do a couple of lines here and to underline the presence of this whatever and eventually the thing will appear when you put something on stage what is important to you well well it's difficult to say because actually I used to be this one of the problems that I have right now at the Met is that I'm a director and I sit in the room and I direct and it has to look good and it has to work I'm not really happy doing that I do it I think I'm okay at doing that but I'm more interested when I'm on stage when I'm directing from within and what's on stage and the choices that I make are more essential and they're more I'm not trying for it to look good or to fit in the frame or to I feel it so that's why when we do creations I like to be part of the creation I like to be there as an actor so I direct from within I try to do that but I'm interested in I mean there's many things through the years that I've kind of I'm still wondering today why am I doing this instead of doing something that's easier because it's not easy but this whole thing we're all brought up or we're all trained as actors when we go to theater schools or universities or whatever people talk about emotion an actor it's all about emotion but emotion is taught to us as something that's on stage as actors and the actress is working on her emotion and she's expressing this emotion they're doing this whole thing and we're sitting in the room there as spectators and we're going oh we don't feel any emotion but we could see it oh my god it must be so difficult with this Iambic pentameter from Elizabethan Times and Titus Andranicus look at the emotion and we're just but we don't have any we're not allowed to have sex we're not allowed to taste it we're not allowed to so we're spectators of emotion and we're being trained as actors and directed by directors who say that who force that concept that emotion is something that's on the stage and I've never was interested in that as an actor why do I have to go through this whole thing and it's uncomfortable and it's hard and why is it not fun and until I understood that emotion doesn't belong on stage at all it belongs in the room that's where the emotion is and we have to work to move people and that's a completely different game and it's a much it's not I'm not saying it's easier but it's much more it's less masturbatory doesn't sound good when I say that in English right but it's less good to me it's good to you no no but I mean it's less let's do it here it's more generous it's more and the audience it's more the audience is included in the equation and it feels involved and it feels and it feels and instead of just looking at people feel what a great actor and you could be moved as a spectator without the actors being moved even if they're talking about their child was killed during the war but what's important is to for the emotion to be in the room and the survival of theater as an art form depends on that and on nothing else and we are wrongly directed and we've been wrongly directed for a long time in the theater to think the other way around to think an actor has to emote an actor has to well yeah that's interesting that's one way that if you have the right project and maybe that's one path into a certain kind of theater and I had this extraordinary revelation four years ago I'd say I was working on a one man Hamlet with Evgeny Mironov who's probably the greatest Russian actor who's in his mid 40s no not true we just celebrated his 50th anniversary so he's 50 now he was in his mid 40s when I worked with him and he's this extraordinary extraordinary Russian actor in Moscow and who comes from the long tradition of Stanislavsky and I would cringe when I would hear the word Stanislavsky before actor method acting and whatever that became in naturalism in psychology I would just kind of not that I'm not interested in these forms but what I'm saying is I would always be bored and of course here I was working with this great flagship of Stanislavsky approach and I said to him and we were doing this Hamlet thing I don't approach Shakespeare in a Stanislavsky way I just wanted to warn you you're going to be very disappointed with me he said that's because you don't know Stanislavsky I said yeah I've been trained and I've done my workshops and I did the whole method acting thing I did all the works he says yeah but people in America and in western Europe do not know what Stanislavsky is about and he said you only know the first part of his life and when the communist came around there was a second part of his life and he said that's where Stanislavsky got really interested in experimental and pushed it really really far and that part is not we're still kind of teaching to our students the first part of Stanislavsky's discoveries so he said I'll reconcile you with Stanislavsky and he did and what this actor does and so well he does this whole Stanislavsky thing but it's the most generous creative non masturbatory thing he's completely in a second state he's in the character but he has this eye where he really checks the audience and makes sure that they get this subtle double message and his body contradicts what he's actually saying he does all these amazing things and he's completely connected to the room and the emotion is in the room and when you interrupt him during the line where he's in this complete second state he just pops up and says what he doesn't do he's an amazing technician and he's creative for me that was a revelation because we think we know about what acting means and we and we have to believe all the great masters and the people who've done all this amazing experimenting for us and all that but it's being it's not being taught very well it's ill-informed so anyways all just to say that that kind of confirmed for me this thing that the emotion has to be over there because the way the good Russian actors the good Stanislavski Russian actors use that method is really to tell a story I guess it's also why we like to look at puppets or Clice's idea about puppets and actors but also Japanese theater was masked I know you have been influenced by Asian theater yeah mainly Japanese I spent most of the 90s I go to Japan at least twice a year to present my shows but also to do workshops with Japanese actors and before the globe was constructed or reconstructed in London Tokyo had its own Tokyo Globe they had reproduced the globe of course it was called the Panasonic Tokyo Globe but it was fantastic because they would only present Shakespeare Japanese Shakespeare productions but mainly they would invite all of the most interesting directors around the world cheek by jaw would be there all the time some productions from the national or the RSC but of course because it was exactly the dimension of the Shakespeare's globe some productions could not make it because there was not enough space for it so there was this I saw some Igmar Bergman plays there it was a really really amazing place and what struck me about the Japanese culture in general but also the theatrical tradition whether it's avant-garde theater or traditional theater in Japan is that it's very Baroque it's very permissive it's very playful it has all the things that why I wanted to do theater and I could find that in Japanese theater so let's say we do the tempest so we will try to work very hard we'll audition actors you know we'll want the girl who plays Miranda to be a believable daughter for the prosper that we've chosen and we want everybody to be speaking the language the same way I mean if we have time and money we will want everybody to be we'll have a good Shakespeare coach who will come and explain how to use the pentameter and the text and we will want everybody on that stage to look as if they come from the same theater school if we do three sisters we want the three sisters to give the impression that there are three real sisters that's what we do in the West they do the opposite you do the tempests the people playing the court will be actors from the kabuki who have a certain way of doing you have a kind of a sprite or a fairy or an aerial would be somebody from the kyogen tradition the lovers would be what they call western style actors and for them that's rich that's and what we do I mean they're interested in what we do but it's a bit boring because it's like one thing it's like a bento box and that for me was so liberating why why does it work we would do this and it would be a mess you know so how do you make it work so I got interested in that aspect of Japanese theater and saw how rich it is and how permissive and even in the most traditional kabuki piece there's that crazy baroque thing that goes on that's never that's still present today and I'm sure they're very auto-critical about that and they probably feel that's gone away but when I go to Tokyo I go to Kabukiza and I see these reproductions of stagings of a piece from like 100 or 200 years ago and it's full of creativity there's never any fourth wall you walk in you could actually speak during the show and you could eat and the lights are open because what's on stage is so over the top it's so larger than life it's so colorful you will never disrupt that you will never have an actor that goes can you please shut up please I'm trying to concentrate they don't say a word until you scream their name because they have this thing like in a sports event you scream the actors acting family name and the more it's difficult for the person to act the more he needs the audience to scream that at him it's extraordinary it's an extraordinary permissive eventful playful thing that we've killed that we've drowned in schmaltz in the west I don't have the pretension to be able to do that as well but I'm certainly influenced by that and I'm interested in that aspect of Japanese theater it is stage mechanisms and doors that opens and slides and things big surprises in the middle of the play who's dead would get up and do a song and then is dead again all these things we have our time to believe speaking of larger than life or big things we showed the documentary in the afternoon about the image mill there's a big industrial building at the port of kebac that actually stands in between you and the view of the ships that come in that actually is an image of archival image of the world we should actually see them and you can't so he did a projection of 500 meters times 50 meters high the most complex thing I have ever seen to be putting up so you projected something on the city but now you created this this le diamant where a diamond as you said before a diamond is a diamond because actually more light comes out that's why when it's cut right and it has to lose sometimes two thirds of its weight to do so but your projection of the diamant on the city as a piece of art or an artwork what is your vision for that actually the diamant is a project that will hopefully open its doors in two years from now it's been quite a complex and financial but it's now officially going to happen so we're building this space and it's called le diamant for the reasons you were it's also because Quebec City was founded on a cape that is called Cape Diamond because when the French first explored Canada they came and they stopped there because they thought there were diamonds in the cape but actually it was just like cheap minerals they regretted it but it was still called Cape Diamond so that was part of it but also because in 1997 when we opened our first centre called La Cazanne in Quebec City it's an old fire hall that became our kind of incubator where we do all our stuff and we develop our shows and all that we had people from out of the world friends and people we've collaborated with actors or whatever who would send videos say good luck for your centre Bob Wilson send us this very nice clip of him who says in a very Bob Wilson fashion to Robert LaPage for his centre our cities need centres a diamond and an apple so which was a very Bob Wilson thing of course to say so I went oh diamond and an apple that's a nice image you know the city is the apple and the diamond is okay I say it was his final work at Pratt Institute when he studied as a student really? yeah well the thing is that that image of a diamond and an apple kind of grew on me and I thought okay at first it's yeah it is a cultural centre which is a very very bright luminous thing in the middle of a city but then the diamond is an interesting metaphor also for the different facets that you were describing this different discipline I mean to do theatre is supposed to be a gathering place supposed to be the gathering of all other disciplines you know people who are into architecture can end up doing participating to theatre music people from the world of literature the people who work with dance so all arts can actually converge towards theatre theatre is a great mother art so the diamond has that kind of idea of these different facets and all of these things shine each other but is also if you push it further a diamond in its first expression is a very very rough thing before you polish it and all that and a few months ago I was invited I train at a gym where there's this big buff guy who's a prison guard who never spoke to me for about a year and he walks in and at one point he came and says hey Robert I'm surprised he knows my name he says I'd really like you to come and see me fight I'm a wrestler and I'm the champion and he's a champion of this North Shore Division or something like that pro wrestling match in Quebec City and this kind of hall or whatever and I'd like you to come and see me wrestle okay so bunch of people from X-MAC artsy fartsy people we're all going to go see some wrestlers and we sit there and it was this amazing evening in the theatre it was the greatest thing and it was it reminded me my first impressions in Japanese theatre this kind of raw popular loud larger than life characters that predetermined pre-written but completely improvised all of the great emotions and the great heroes and foes are and they put on costumes like Peter Gabriel and all these people it's an extraordinary theatrical evening this wrestling match and of course in all its clumsiness and what this has to be at the Diamond side by side with a Shakespeare show or a Castellucci show it has to be side by side it has to be and also because the audience that's there there is no fourth wall people are standing up and there's screaming filth at the people and there's all this stuff going on of course it's very rough but there's luminous moments there's acrobatics there's art, there's theatre, there's even music everybody has their theme when they walk in there's this whole thing that goes on and so anyways I was so impressed that I went back to Ex Machina and I said well listen because at the Diamond we're going to have circus artists we're going to have dance it's going to be a plurid disciplinary place where all these people are going to be working together and showing their stuff in the different rooms and all that but they asked to be wrestling also so everybody went are you serious and I said yeah that's what was missing the unpolished thing and also the audience that comes with that the Diamond has to be a place where all audiences have to be of course the scratch their heads financially how do you make this work and people are not used to going to that part of town and if they have to pay for parking what are we going to do we're kind of reflecting on all of that wrestling might help probably and for me it became we really have to so anyways I go to see this guy I never actually got to know his real name his stage name is Marco Estrada he's a Quebecoa guy nothing to do with Marco with a K so so I go to see Marco in the dressing room at the gym and I say hey I really enjoyed your show the other day and I'm bragging and I'm saying it was fantastic and I said well and I'm doing a new one man show that's what I'm going to be doing at BAM it's called 887 and I was actually performing in Quebecoa city at that moment and this is a new one man show so I said I'll get you a pair of tickets you know if you want to come with your girlfriend or whatever and come see my show so you could see you know I saw what you do and you could see what I do it's oh yeah I'd be very interested in all that so anyways he shows up with a guy who's twice as big as him this big guy and they come see the show and they're flabbergasted and they loved it they were moved and in the dressing room after the show and we're talking and all that I'm really happy and moved that they've liked it and all that but they were wrestling that evening and so they came to see the matinee at one point they go oh I have to go because we're wrestling together he's my nemesis and he was actually with his best friend who on stage in the ring his worst enemy and it was so amazing and I just went my god this is a world I want to know about because also one of the conditions because you know to be an astronaut they do all these tests you have to be fearless right there has to be something in your brain that's missing because you know you're in a tin can and you're running out of fuel and you have to land on the moon and you just stay very calm and say okay we'll do this okay fine thank you we're here you have to be so that part of your brain has to be nonexistent so it's the same thing for wrestling for wrestling you have to be non-aggressive the people who wrestle the people who end up being the champions the people who are the sweetest peaceful non-aggressive people because you can't you know you can't be saying okay well tonight kick me here and I'll do a pirouette and then I'll do that and then you break his nose and other guys who's going to so that's one of the basic conditions you can only be part of the team if you don't have a single speck of violence or aggression and I just I want to know what these people are about you know it just completely intrigues me so anyways it's a very long aggression to say that the sort of the diamond for me is a meeting point a meeting place for that kind of encounter yeah and that we you know know which other worlds that don't normally connect and that you can live out aggressive impulses and energy on a stage but in a several way why we have theater in a city because we see why we think it's important anyway goes back to Athens and Greek theater that's why we have it we think a civilized country and city has its theater and that was you know the audience was higher the temples actually the gods were in the temple while you were performing and the actor spoke through them they actually were facing not each other they were facing the gods you saw often the city of Athens or the other city in the background but it has a civic function beyond that what is what do you see the difference you know besides and that you say we show different things but do you expect from it that the city of Quebec will be a different city well yes I think so but I'm more interested in trying to model that place for what the function of theater will be it's very pretentious what I'm saying you're building a new Athens what's your idea what is your vision it's because and I'm sure a lot of people disagree but you will agree with me one day it's that theater can only survive if it's an event most of theater people in theater companies and theater producers and all that are working really hard to make it a habit they want you to subscribe they want you to be there a lot of the theater is being said come to see us you will be entertained you'll forget about your problems it's all the promo is all about come to see us and nothing will happen right but that's what's burying theater people go to the theater if it's something you have to see people pay $1,500 to see Hamilton because supposedly it's nothing but it's the event right so theater has to be an event and also shapes and forms doesn't need to be Hamilton it has to be eventful certainly in a world where storytellers are all over the place and the offer is so huge if I have a home cinema a high high definition Netflix offers me whatever I want doesn't cost me much I don't have to pay for a parking lot I don't have to make reservations in a restaurant don't have to pay for a babysitter don't have to dress up so I'm going to stay home tonight I'm not going to go see three sisters I'm not going to go see the new play by this new Irish writer that's supposed to be amazing I'm going to stay home I'm going to pull these people out and bring them to the theater and say it's important so theater has to be an event otherwise if you have the choice you're going to stay home that's more and more so I know some people would disagree with me but that's what I feel and I do a lot of projects and I do a lot of shows circus shows I think I'm starting to know enough about what today's audience is about and what makes them tick and where they're ready to embark on to something that they've never been on and when they are looking for comfort so I'm starting to get a sense of that and I have to represent theater only works when it's eventful when people say I can't miss this I have to be there, I have to go and there's a comfort zone also people want to be they don't want to be entertained they want to feel intelligent they want to embark on to something that will be playful and where they will feel that they can actually participate even if it doesn't mean to be I have to be there and I have to ask questions if you have the impression that you're connecting the dots and that what you're seeing is not masticated for you it's not tasted for you before it's given to you if you go there and you have the impression that it could only happen if you're there for real and if the show needs you if you understand all these things theater becomes exciting and fun and eventful and people go to see it and it works but if it's solved like something that will put you to sleep and relax you or massage you and all that it's going to kill the craft and it's urgent because people have their own devices and they have access to so many storytellers on youtube now so if you still want to find the purpose of theater you have to reflect about why would I personally go to see a show tonight what is it about it so you have to go back to the idea that theater is also a sport right there's something there has to be a ball there that might fall that people, the actors might drop the ball and that's something risky I could go on forever and ever about this but I had the impression that there's very few people who really reflect about that the survival of our companies, of your companies our craft, our traditions the future of theater where it should go and we're busy running businesses and we're not good at it anyway I wish you would be in charge of one of the many new spaces that are being built at the moment in New York City but I fear they might be more on the sleepwalking part but speaking of participation and opening it up maybe Brad and Michael we have a bit of light on the audience we take some audience questions which is important for us but also Robert LaPachette please make sure there is a dialogue so if you have some comments like one, two and three so we'll four, okay we'll start with you we'll record and not only we hear you better supposedly after 20 minutes it's always good, it's a little bit reinforced but we also we are recording it and live streaming it so let's hold it close and save maybe who you are you have to sign a release after your question yeah sure me I very much appreciate everything you've done you're being in New York as a Quebecer at Montrealer I run the Council for Canadian-American Relations and we're all about facilitating cross-border collaboration and supporting artistic organizations in both countries so thank you I wanted to ask if you had any reflections had been inspired by or had any collaborations with another Quebec artist who passed away last week Leonard Cohen who is someone that when you spoke about everything that you did that was so rich and all the diverse art forms to me many of the themes resonate in his work as well that with words convey or emote you know so much and I was curious as to whether there had been well I never got to meet him but I got to spend a bit of time with his son Adam who at one point had the project of doing a theater project about Leonard Cohen's not just life but work in general so we had a few discussions I wasn't available enough to actually bring it to fruition but certainly I was very interested in Leonard Cohen's work and of course I'm from that generation that has listened to a lot of his work and identified a lot to it because he had this identity thing being a Quebecer, a Montrealer but being an Anglo and a Jewish guy and this whole kind of and how you make that resonate in the world and in world culture so of course he was a great inspiration that's for sure but I never got to meet him thank you I would like to come back on what you said about the emotion on the room as a director how do you build the emotion for the audience well as I said there's something about the playfulness for me I'm a bit obsessed with this idea that the theater even if we're doing a Greek tragedy or we're doing a psychological drama things have to be playful and I think that if the audience is engaged in the story you're telling the story and as I said earlier if you don't connect all the dots for them if you just put the dots there and all that the actual action is the way people listen and they become very involved emotionally they do their own connections and then they refer to stuff that is very personal that they can't really share so in all of that process it removes people because they are involved in the thinking process in the building of the story and for that you have to create something that is very very emotionally sparse I'm going to explain that you should not cry for the people in the room you have to reproduce on stage the the energy of an emotion but you don't necessarily need the emotional of course an actor can be emotional and be caught in the emotion of the moment and all that but I think that that's what it's difficult to explain it directly but that for me was one of the things about people always thought that he's I think you call it alienation in English in French it's horribly translated as distanciation which makes it even sound even colder oh my god there's a German person here the effect which is the effect of making something strange unfamiliar unfamiliar yeah but it is a very very warm process this idea of making something unfamiliar and strange distanciation creates a distance so it sounds as if it's a cold intellectual process but I think that I always for example when I'm doing l'amour de la wine I'm working with this amazing singer Susanna Phillips an amazing soprano who's a great actor also and she's approached the role she did all her research and all that and she's been working on the psychology of her character and all that and the music just doesn't come out in the first rehearsals and she's wondering because she did all this but I say don't try to make it psychological the emotion is poetic it's full of poetic license and for her that kind of changed her approach and since then she's been doing the most amazing moving things but of course she's a technician on the right pitch so she's it's all this kind of thing and she writes it as she goes on and she becomes the writer of the music the writer of the libretto and that's how it's been my thing that's where I'm interested in collective creation is that I believe that if acting is to pretend that you are actually writing the words you're not writing the words you're not asking an actor what would you say how would you write it or what is it that you need to say so that's a very very different energy in the room when you have people who are sincere and people who are authentic that creates a presence that is a very very moving thing but instead of finding people who are natural naturalism or psychologically motivated and they go into this whole thing it's difficult to explain but it's my approach is more it's a playful poetic approach and when I was saying that I had this illumination when I worked with Evgeny in Moscow four years ago that's what it was he had nothing to do with psychology what he was doing but he was in a state he had the energy of the situation the character in that situation and it was like really but he was using the poetry of Shakespeare and the poetry of the stage language and the movement and all that to express and that is much more moving and what he was doing was authentic and that's always a very very very moving when you're in the presence of something that's authentic I don't know how to describe it better but thank you much for sharing with us much an admirer of your work the two films that we saw today two quick questions one is for the triptique a color question because it seems so much brown and the sepia and occasionally there was it seems the Christmas scene of the old things where there was blue and red so it was a color if you had a conscious and the other is with the moulin aimage you had said that there was no storyboard and I'm very interested in the idea of narration you know the thread obviously you had a plan where you're going but the difference between the storyboard and a narration if there was one of the moulin aimage well for the moulin aimage but also for other works we did a nine hour show called Lip Sync and Seven Streams of the Revotas was a seven hour show and we never tried to write a story from A to Z we rehearse we do all these things we do improvs and suddenly there's a little pocket of a story that appears ok well this is going to be in the show and then we continue with another little pocket and eventually all these little jewels these little things appear and eventually they find their place it's almost like doing a recital and you're looking for the what the bands call it a setlist you have your setlist you go well last night we tried this song before this one it was a bit of a downer well let's put it here instead so that's how the structure is done and it's often done in front of the audience so for us day one of the performance is not the guillotine of an opening it's not and from now on it's from now on the real writing and structuring happens so of course the early audience members don't necessarily see they see an interesting show but it's never as interesting and well crafted as if they see it like 50 or 100 performances later so that's pretty much how the structure it finds itself I'd say that process there's something that I call a bottomless well is that let's say a group of actors here we start improvising whatever and so it's a restaurant scene we need a couple and we need a waiter so it's okay you do the waiter you do the wife, you'll do the husband and after that we do it again but this time you do the husband, you do the waitress and you do the friend and then we do it again and then every change is all the time eventually you end up playing a character that's not in your casting usually you never cast it for this kind of thing but you do it and you discover that you're a bottomless it's a bottomless well it's a character that you could improv for a thousand years and you never run out but because we're being casted you're a well well you'll play the kid and you look like the father but in this what we do is that we just change all the time there's no real kind of casting and eventually you end up performing something you never thought you'd be able to do and it's bottomless it's just because of some characters you could do and maybe after five minutes you've run out of but this one is forever we say okay we have a bottomless well and we'd sit this guy's in the show you know we don't know what's his relationship with the story we don't know what's his relationship with the other characters but we do that and eventually all these bottomless wells appear they pop up and we know these guys the people who will be following they'll be the main characters probably and eventually they are related you know we start to find out if we marry to this one or this one is actually this guy's brother or this guy is his boss so this whole thing kind of builds but you have these characters that belong specifically to that actor and that are it doesn't sound good in English bottomless but sorry but what I mean is that there's no end to what you could do so we could improv them forever so then when we start performing the night of the opening these characters are there and they're really interesting and they draw you in but they keep evolving and they can adapt we rewrite the show that actually the scene goes there and this one's changes purpose or whatever these characters adapt to anything they're like pieces of the puzzle that could be placed anywhere because they're like full of resources so that's pretty much what I tried to once again you can't command that you can't order that it happens and you have to have a nigh for it and a near for it and you have to go oh I think this okay this guy's going to come back for sure and eventually you and for the color question the first color question I don't know what to answer because it's my director of photography who made all these choices and I don't have any real kind of I approved because I thought it was cool but I didn't have any kind of intent I have a question about the diamond I think your idea of it being pluridisciplinary both artistically but sort of beyond artistic means is very exciting and unique Frank mentioned that there's a couple of key art centers opening up here in New York and I'm wondering if in your plans for the amount if you plan to have any particular relationships with other art centers in New York or other cities you know maybe similar to the way that's kind of more of a European model and having those kinds of that's part of the whole plan and of course for it to be an international meeting point for you know theater craftsmen and performers and thinkers and of course that's the idea but the thing is that the actual form of the place the shape the architectural project of the Zyama is also part of the thing in the sense that we want it to be able to greet all kinds of shapes and forms and there's something about because we never really discussed it but this you know it used to be that the film world would be one thing and the theater world would be another of course now with interactive videos and people using new technology and recorded image and sound all that more and more in the theater these disciplines seem to kind of be merging and the reason why is because the technology that they use starts to be similar so basically there's a lot of disciplines who don't mix because the technologies that they use are so different but the more the digital age and the tools start to be the same the more it's easy for them so it's the same thing for spaces so we're trying to to design a space a performance space that will greet vertical projects and horizontal projects so what I mean is that the film world and television all that is a horizontal thing and opera and circus is a vertical thing so how do you make these things meet so I end up doing tours certainly in North America I do plays in rooms that used to be cinemas so you're in this kind of horizontal space and then we go on tour in Europe so these vertical things because you play in old opera houses or whatever so so for me it's very important because it doesn't just have to do with the shape and the form of the frame it has to do with the nature of the art itself opera and circus are stories that are told vertically right there's the stage and this man and then there's always aspirations coming from the flies or whatever that's what he wants to become and then you have all the traps that you know when you fall into hell right so the story is often said like that but film is about road movies it's about panning like this of course you know he does some things going on like this a lot but it's a lot about man and his territory and whatever so it's a completely different way so theater is starting to borrow from that and it's storytelling and cinema is starting to change a bit the shape also so I have the impression that we're moving towards storytelling that will start to be a hybrid between this horizontal and vertical way of telling stories sorry I just kind of went into this kind of maybe one or two more questions one and one more anybody two oh here three okay that's it bonsoir could you tell us more about your making of or presenting of l'amour de loin at the Met what your vision is and convince us to come to it well yeah well I wasn't here necessarily to sell tickets for the Met but no it's an amazing opera it's tough to find a good contemporary opera I mean programmers will tell you that we also have the impression that they're kind of counting on old 19th century or 18th century stuff because they're sure bets but actually it's also because the for audiences are resisting I guess to contemporary opera poor sorts of reasons but l'amour de loin is one of these rare operas it was written in 2000 but it was first produced in the year 2000 in Salzburg and it has it is contemporary music but because it refers it was all written around this ballad that a troubadour wrote in the 13th century it's kind of like a take on that medieval piece of music and Kaya created this amazing contemporary piece of music and the story is medieval it's about this troubadour who falls in love with a woman he never saw who's in Lebanon and the woman in Lebanon falls in love with this man because she hears the song that he wrote about her and there's this pilgrim that just kind of navigates between the two so it's about this ideal the purity of love and the ideal love and all that this sea that separates the lovers so l'amour de loin means love from afar and it's based on a legend because this guy Geoffrey Rudel the troubadour actually existed and supposedly crossed that sea to go and see his loved one and got sick on the boat and traumatized or whatever and he died in her arms when he arrived so this is kind of beautiful impossible love story and the sea that separates them is the bulk of the music you know so Peter Sellers created it in Salzburg and his solution was to put water on stage and all that and it was very beautiful production and very efficient and all that but water is a tricky thing if you're going to be at the Met because it's about 12 shows and repertoire you don't want to have water on your stage and also because for me it's very beautiful so we've created this sea of led lights this is something I think there's 38,000 led lights that are the sea and people come in and float and the lights are shimmering and creating all these amazing sea like wave like effects and all that and the chorus is under these lights and they bob their heads through them so it's a very of a medieval story so it's a nice so it reflects the music the music is the meeting point of these two ideas Hi, my question is also about the Metropolitan Opera about the previous productions and I guess everything that you do is computer technology driven I think what I read about the other productions was one of them had something to do with the backdrop behind the performers changing color or something as they sang and the other one moving planks can you give us an idea of how those things worked and what it was all about? and how they don't work at times but I didn't see any of the productions there was one production, Damnation of Us which was mainly about how any imagery any video animation or whatever that would accompany the story would be triggered by the artists themselves the singers but also by the swell of the orchestra so you'd have a flock of birds in the background that would be flying and the birds their flights would be influenced by the pitch by the rhythm the tempese there was so many elements but because everything was mic'd and that would tell if it would indicate to the birds, virtual birds how high to fly how to gather, how close so it was all these things so all of the high tech vocabulary was triggered by singers and the other thing was this huge monster of a production called The Ring that was really an experience anyway it was a huge thing with planks, it was 24 planks creating all these different we saw a picture of one of the dragon so it was a very controversial production because it was presented in front of an audience of a very enthusiastic audience but part of these people are sitting there with scores not looking at the stage and they're going like this and they're going, oh, you know they've cut that passage she didn't sing this note and at one point if you're doing anything on stage and it creaks and cracks or crashes and they go, oh my god there's a production there we don't want that, you know this is not opera, there should not be any noise, there should not be any anyways so it was quite an experience it's five years of that so I'm not sure I'm going to venture into that last question yes, hi, hello actually I'm from Japan so and she asked about already about the machine that was my initial thought and actually it was quite eventful to have that machine on the stage and I was eager to go and to see everything and what was your initial idea to have that machine and could you talk it in like a context of, you know event and emotion in the room yeah well actually, the concept was very simple is that we wanted to create 24 planks of a regular stage, you know, we just wanted to look like a very banal stage very classic and very, and then at the stage the planks would, depending of the positions of the plank that suddenly you would move into a more contemporary vocabulary but then it implied that to be a machine and a monster and all that, but at the beginning it was just playing with 24 planks and their positions, it's just that it became a very heavy idea but everything was programmed and all that but it was a very, very classical approach and I don't want to offend anybody here but most rings that I had seen were what we call Euro trash just everybody has everybody has something, a problem to solve with Wagner you know there's always people are always doing something and I just, you know as my first ring, I'd like it to be about these gods and that mythology and a lot of that mythology is actually Icelandic it's not German at all it's Icelandic and I wanted to go back to that and all that, so the idea was to create and I've been to Iceland I'm a great fan of Iceland and the thing that's amazing about Iceland is that it's because I studied geology that was supposed to be my thing before I became a theater person, I was supposed to be a geography teacher or a geologist so and the thing about the technotic plates and the thing about Iceland it's an island it's a country that is in constant movement you know there's volcanoes erupting and there's things sinking the actual island is split in two and it's actually separating six centimeters a year so people in Iceland live on a ground that's very unstable and a lot of the mythology comes from that so that was the basic thing to create something a floor that looks very simple but if an opera singer walks on it suddenly it goes and then of course you have to deal with the opera singers but it's a very good documentary about it that the Met produced actually it's quite interesting you see the whole it's called Wagner's Dream so and that I must say because the Wagner Society because you have to go through you have to go through all the tests in New York when you do the ring you have to go through the Wagner Society and there's a lot of research on how Wagner had intended what he wanted to do and of course the technology wasn't there's a lot of stuff he wanted to do and the tautology just wasn't there so that was also part of the pretension of this concept was to say well well I think Wagner would have wanted to do this and do that and have the actors do this and have the singer do that so there's this whole preamble which is the whole concept and I think this is also one of the great things about theatre that life is unstable actually people try to tell you something is perfect and mama dad only play baseball and do cookies and everything is actually not it's more like Shakespeare it's more like Wagner this is normal and we deal with it and we look at it and solve our own problems often in life whether it's family or political things through the stories we look at so again you're such a great master and we gave us a little glimpse of your your craft and your brain and the mechanics how it's working and about the wrestling there's a wonderful essay by Roland Barth about wrestling and how significant and important it is and also connected to popular culture we all don't take seriously enough and also the energy that comes from it and we really all should look at it again I wish we had you here was a big art center and it's really our hope that our home might open old trade routes where the fur traders once went back and forth and we do it with theatre for New York companies and Kibbequa Canadian work will come international work and we hope maybe we will be a little bit a little speck of the little lights within that diameter we would be thrilled to be connected again thank you for coming and I think he really gave us wonderful insights and thank you for taking the time thank you