Film, ballet and theatre collide in Frame by Frame
Robert Lepage brings his unique vision to the National Ballet of Canada
TORONTO — Quebec multimedia maverick Robert Lepage has built a career dazzling audiences with imaginative and innovative works in many different disciplines.
Take, for instance, the opera he did with shadow puppets and an orchestra pit filled with thousands of litres of water (“The Nightingale and Other Short Fables”). Or the nine-hour stage production “Lipsynch,” which he later turned into the film “Triptych.”
But until now, the writer, director and actor had never brought his unique vision to the National Ballet of Canada.
Viewers will get a first taste of the work when “Frame by Frame” runs Friday through June 10 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.
“We’ve been trying to make this happen for a long time now,” Lepage said in a recent interview.
“(Artistic director) Karen (Kain) has been kind of chasing me around for the past 15 years or something like that. But it’s always a question of scheduling.”
“Frame by Frame” is a collaboration between the National Ballet as well as Lepage’s multidisciplinary production company, Ex Machina, and the National Film Board of Canada.
The show is an homage to the life and work of the late Canadian pioneer filmmaker Norman McLaren, who won an Oscar for the 1952 short “Neighbours” and founded the NFB’s animation studio.
Lepage directs while the choreography is done by Guillaume Cote, who is a principal dancer and choreographic associate at the National Ballet.
“Working with Robert, the whole process has been truly enriching for me as an artist,” said Cote. “I’ve also realized a little bit about what I’d like to do with dance, what I’d like to develop with dance and maybe a side of dance that I think needs to change.”
This production could help broaden the ballet’s audiences, he added.
“I feel that ultimately all the art forms do need to be, at some point, shaken up a little bit,” Cote said.
“The purest way of seeing dance will always be valid. It’s really interesting to see dance in its purest form with just dancers dancing to music.
“But now there is a need, in the new generation, for coming to the theatre and seeing ... something they could never experience at home on YouTube or in a smaller venue.”
Previews of the production on the National Ballet’s website show dancers moving onstage as video projections and lights create special effects.
Lepage said the show presents a biographical thread of McLaren’s life “in a very impressionistic way” with characters. McLaren was “obsessed with movement” and worked with classical ballet dancers, so this project “felt like such an organic process.”
“I’m always excited to work with people from other disciplines, because I try to learn from that specific discipline and bring it to my own craft,” said Lepage, who is also directing “Coriolanus” at the Stratford Festival.
“The common point between classical ballet compared to contemporary ballet is that people from the classical ballet are used to telling stories — they put costumes on and play a prince and all these characters — so there is a theatricality to classical ballet. So that’s my door into their world.”
But classical ballet also offers an “abstraction and a freedom” that theatre doesn’t necessarily have or should have, he added.
“So I learn from that and try to understand, why is classical ballet so moving to look at, even though it’s a lot of technique, it’s a lot of physical training and rehearsing and form and shapes?” Lepage said.
“I think the common denominator is not just a theatricality, it’s also the humanity, like a bunch of human beings onstage creating these shapes and forms and this visual poetry. So that I think is an important thing for me to reimport into the theatre.”