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| Eonnagata. A Story about a Person – Spherical Being Margarita Zieda, Theatre Critic | |
| Canadian director Robert Lepage has been called a wizard by the global press because he has restored a sense of wonderment and surprise to the theatre, and the capacity for an audience to be emotionally moved. Robert Lepage is one of the most significant boundary shifters in world theatre. | |
 Robert Lepage. Publicity photo | |
| Lepage considers the emotional emptiness is often left by modern theatre as a vital issue: “When I watch theatre today this is a problem for me. I see how well it is produced, how great the actors are, yet I am left wondering why these people on the stage are crying, screaming and suffering, but nothing is happening inside me. Why do I pay money to see people suffering? I can see that in many other places for free. I want to cry, laugh, wonder and sense intelligence in the theatre.” Lepage has firm views regarding the boredom he often experiences in theatre. He believes this is caused by the fact that theatre is lagging behind the other art forms, it uses outdated storytelling vocabulary and the experience that people have gained from watching other types of art makes them quickly tire of the paucity of communication they are offered in the theatre. Robert Lepage’s ambition to make theatre develop in tandem with other art forms began to take shape when he brought together a team of architects, cinema people, sound specialists, lighting designers, opera singers and dancers, all of whom were exploring new ideas in their respective field. Theatre has always been the product of a synthesis of the arts, but the difference in Lepage’s case is that he regards the artists invited into his creative group not as servants of the director’s vision, but as creators in their own right; within the performance space they are equal players in creative interaction with the other artists. More-over, Lepage’s number one criterion for choosing team members is their human and professional endowments. Back in 1993 in Quebec, when Lepage brought together practitioners of various art forms and founded his group Ex Machina, he deliberately avoided using the term “theatre.” Because, as the director has said, he believed then and still believes today in the possibility of creating a new form of communication which lies somewhere between theatre, cinema, visual art and dance, and can be created without using these arts in a conventional manner. One example of this would be making theatre use the language of cinema, i.e. borrowing forms of storytelling from other narrative dictionaries. With the ‘Dragon Trilogy’, ‘Seven Streams of the River Ota’ and one of his latest works, a performance devoted to the human voice called ‘Lipsynch’, Lepage has created vast, transcontinental theatre epics running for six to nine hours. ‘KA’ involved using the latest technologies to expand the actors’ scope for expression and was Lepage’s response to a challenge set by Las Vegas multimillionaires to create something new and unprecedented. These gigantic shows are still followed up by Lepage’s solo performances, because these are unique opportunities for him to express himself. | |
 Eonnagata | |
| Lepage’s ‘Eonnagata’ premiered in March 2009 at London’s Sadler´s Wells, and in autumn it was short listed as one of the most outstanding works at the Berlin international theatre festival spielzeit’europa. This year’s festival ran under the motto “The Giants Arrive.” This work has developed in a different, almost completely opposite way to the usual course of Lepage’s works. In this case, Lepage himself was invited to participate, rather than him inviting other artists to create a joint project. And this took place at a festival in Sydney, Australia, where the unique French prima ballerina assoluta Sylvia Guillem, one of the top contemporary British choreographers Russell Maliphant (with the performance ‘Push’) and Lepage (with his one man show ‘The Andersen Project’) were performing. After seeing Lepage’s bitterly wonderful show about loneliness, Guillem went backstage to meet the author and expressed her desire to work with him. Lepage took this as an invitation to create a performance with the world renowned dancer, and promised to think about it. He thought quite long and in the wrong direction. Guillem had been thinking along other lines – she wanted to dance together with Lepage on stage. Thus ‘Eonnagata’ was created –in which Lepage dances. The material with which Lepage has chosen to work is a story about the 18th century diplomat, soldier, spy and writer, Chevalier d’Eon Charles Liane de Beaumont, a great mystery to his contemporaries: “Charles Liane de Beaumont was a young chevalier with a high voice and a very attractive face. Louis XV admired him greatly. When a conflict broke out between France and Russia and the tsarina refused to receive French emissaries, the king sent his chevalier as a spy, dressed in women’s clothes. He managed to achieve an agreement with the tsarina and returned to France with a concluded treaty. At this time, gossip began spreading throughout Europe that the man dressed up as a woman was actually a woman raised by her parents as a man. The mysterious figure had six names, three male and three female. Louis XV later sent him as a consul to England. But he didn’t fare well in the king’s service. Marie Antoinette gave him her old outfits, but the king couldn’t stand him and wanted to get rid of him. After the French Revolution, the chevalier was forced to earn a living as a circus freak. He died in London, and the doctors who performed an autopsy reported that he was a man. And immediately rumours spread that the doctor’s report was a forgery.” This is the story that has come down to us today, and no one knows what in it is true and what is not. But Lepage is not interested in establishing the truth of the story, he is more interested in the person. The performance’s main question is – what happened within the chevalier? What happened inside this person as identities alternated, with one crumbling and another replacing it? The title ‘Eonnagata’ embodies a coded reference to the onnagata in Japanese kabuki theatre, male actors who played refined women in a stylised manner. In Lepage’s ‘Eonnagata’ Charles Liane de Beaumont is played by three distinctive contemporary artists. | |
 Eonnagata | |
| Sylvia Guillem is a dancer unrestricted by genre, being an equally talented exponent of classical ballet and performer in the most radical works of the most able of contemporary choreographers. Following her first performance at age 19 in ‘Swan Lake’, Rudolf Nureyev brought her into Étoile, ballet troupe of the Paris Opera, and Guillem became its youngest star. Many talented and unique artists have invited her to be part of their works, including Rudolf Nureyev, Maurice Béjart, William Forsythe, Mats Ek, Akram Khan and Robert Wilson. Lepage considers that one of Guillem’s special characteristics is being strong and athletic as well as gracious, giving her the ability to combine amazing lightness of movement with masculine energy. Conversely, Russell Maliphant is a choreographer and dancer with feminine characteristics, a quirky phenomenon of the British stage whose dances are characterised by the fusion of various dance techniques with a diversity of movement and body techniques, including yoga, tai chi, Capoeira, acrobatics and contact improvisation. Charles Liane de Beaumont is played by Robert Lepage himself. In this performance, he has accepted Guillem’s challenge not to reduce his stage presence merely to positions which suit an actor. Lepage dances together with Guillem and Maliphant. Having trained seriously and at the same time exposed and vulnerably restricted alongside the great dancers, Lepage becomes the human core of the story. The performance begins with him. The space is rent by lightning and a thunderstorm, split by Lepage’s swords. More precisely, this person and his swords emanate a dense, threatening, deep blue space pierced by lightning, which is only visible in brief flashes, fragments of images, and which energetically encroaches into the auditorium with a terrible power. The sensory nature of theatre is its number one quality, Lepage believes. And the show’s lighting and sound are players on the same level as the trio of actors, opening up in an extremely broad amplitude, from the megawatts of a Hollywood blockbuster to solitude, silence, piano. Lighting designer Michael Hull and sound designer Jean Sébastian Côté are also among the creators of this performance. Rarely does lighting in a stage production have such force and poetry as it does in ‘Eonnagata’, with Robert Wilson’s self-created optical marvels. British fashion designer Alexander McQueen is also a creator. Deemed an enfant terrible, this provocative artist has a bad boy image, but has created some of the world’s most romantic and feminine outfits of the last 50 years. He was delighted to take part in this project, subject to the condition that he would be the creator of the costumes, rather than merely fulfilling a commission. Skin hugging knitted body-suits with erased gender indicators are the “skin” of the images, which are garbed in both luxuriant robes and frill-covered caricatures of costumes. The richly embroidered golden kimono stands on the stage like a living, precious being. As it opens, a man appears. As he slides back in, his silhouette turns into a woman’s silhouette. The person under the costume changes. With the poppy red taffeta coat, the bright white silk kimono and the black-blue sparkling morning coat, in ‘Eonnagata’ McQueen is more minimalist than in any of his collections, subtly playing with historic styles and transforming them into modern elegance. Lepage’s show is full of miracles: people in it can suddenly become weightless beings and, against the law of gravitation, rise several metres and disappear into the dark. But they are not levitated by any black ropes from the rafters or by any other assisting device visible to the eye. It just happens. Something becomes something else. Using a sword as a quill, Guillem writes a letter with such intensity and belligerent force that the table turns into a battlefield. Lepage appears as a circus freak and performs tricks with small, shiny metallic rings, until in one moment they tie him up so he is incapable of the slightest movement. What little text there is in the performance is in the form of letters and reports. Guillem tells the story of the spherical people from Plato’s ‘Symposium’. Once there were three genders: male, descended from the Sun, female from the Earth and a combination of the two descended from the Moon. The spherical people had four hands, four feet and one head in which the faces were turned towards each other. These people were so happy that Zeus became jealous and split them in two. From that time on, the two sides stood up on two legs each and were filled with longing –to be rejoined once more. The finale of the performance is sorrowful and cold. A dead person lying on a metal table is dissected by the living. A halogen line flies through the space like a plumb line. It is the only source of light, and gradually the amplitude of its movement decreases. Ultimately it comes to a halt directly above the deceased. Darkness. Lepage combines his arsenal of wonders and many art forms into a performance which has maximum impact on the whole emotional spectrum of the audience, leaving a trail of emotional turmoil behind and making us think about just the one thing – about the person whose story has just been told. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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