TEAMING OF LEPAGE, MCLAREN IS PURE GENIUS
New ballet collaboration Frame by Frame inspired by 1952 film Neighbours
While this country is full of brilliant artists, it seems to me the only one who actually qualifies as a genius is Robert Lepage.
He is an actor and a director and a writer and a performer, but most important, he is a creator in the purest sense of the word.
Whether on film or stage, in opera or drama, in one-man shows that he writes, directs and performs in, often then handing them off to other great actors, he is a bona fide genius.
We have had others, including the Scottish immigrant Norman McLaren, a pillar of the remarkable animation heritage at the National Film Board of Canada, who died in 1987.
Both of these men fundamentally changed the face of their art. Both were also tremendous collaborators, alas not with each other, at least until now.
It is not so much serendipity as poetic justice that will bring the two together, along with dancer and choreographer Guillaume Côté, in a new ballet, Frame by Frame, inspired by McLaren’s 1952 Academy Award-winning film, Neighbours, as well as other elements of his life. The production, presented by the National Ballet of Canada, will be performed in Toronto June 1 to 10, 2018.
The simple storyline of the film: two neighbours live peacefully side by side until a flower grows between their houses. The men fight to the death over its ownership.
While the story might be simple, its rendering is what made the film famous. McLaren used his highly honed animator’s skills on humans, including what we now think of as pixilation.
The attraction of McLaren’s artistry for Lepage is clear. Like McLaren’s, Lepage’s work is fundamentally about movement, whether that be heads popping up all over in his show Piques, Coeurs; flying in Needles and Opium; or going back in time to his childhood Quebec City apartment and his father’s taxi in 887. Everything is in motion; movement drives these pieces.
Apart from directing his own work, Lepage is probably one of the most in-demand opera and theatre directors in the world. He has worked in Japan and Sweden, at Britain’s National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
When not directing or performing, he now spends much of his time on perhaps his most ambitious project ever, Le Diamant Theatre in Quebec City’s Place d’Youville. It is a $54-million, 625-seat theatre designed by the consortium Coarchitecture, scheduled to open sometime in 2018. Lepage is working on his own version of the adage “Think big and stay home.”
The McLaren-Lepage-Côté multimedia ballet is also a collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada and is part of the National Ballet’s season under the reign of Karen Kain, who is not only the artistic director of the company but is soon off to Paris with the company to dance in a production of Nijinsky.
By any standards, what Lepage will have on offer in Toronto and Quebec City in 2018 is extremely exciting, featuring a whole whack of Canadian talent.
Honest truth: I know nothing about ballet. I don’t actually think I have seen more than two. Yes, the Trocadéro and another in Moscow, where I went to see the building, the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera Theatre, as much as the performance. It was, in fact, the Ballet de Paris that performed and it was very good.
Nothing, though, like sipping Russian champagne during the intermission to make one feel so cultured. I thought of changing my name to Anton.
I will, however, bust whatever body part to get a hold of a ticket to Frame by Frame when the show opens in Toronto as part of the National Ballet’s 2018 season.
I will even forego the champagne during the intermission just to show how totally over my Chekhov period I really am. Instead, I will do something very Lepage-ian, if only I knew what that was.