Natalie Rewa
La Trilogie des dragons, conceived and produced under the direction of Robert Lepage, has received national and international acclaim. This analysis of the six-hour version of the production examines how Lepage departs from traditional explorations of cultural communities. In a strikingly flexible playing space the production elicits an intertextual discourse among the disparate texts connoting ethnic experience. Superimposed on a simple narrative exploring the lives of two Québécois women is a metatext which questions the validity of narrow, highly individualized, artistic portrayals of multiculturalism. The mise en scène embodies archaeological inquiry into the physical artifacts of a population; the predominantly non-verbal text encourages a reconsideration of the primacy of written documents as a way of creating meaning; the use of three languages within the course of the production challenges the emphasis placed on linguistic compatibility between stage and audience; and the theatricality highlights, simultaneously, cultural stereotypes and their appropriation into a new context.
La Trilogie des dragons, conçue
par Robert Lepage et produite sous sa direction, a connu une acclamation
tant nationale qu'internationale. Cet article examine la version intégrale
de six heures en y étudiant le décalage qui la sépare
des présentations traditionnelles de communautés culturelles
au théâtre. Dans un espace remarquablement polyvalent, la
pièce encourage un discours intertextuel entre des textes disparates
signifiant l'expérience d'ethnicité. Superimposé sur
le récit simple de la vie de deux Québécoises se révèle
un meta-texte qui interroge la validité des représentations
traditionnelles du multiculturalisme - étroites, artistiques, et
fort subjectives. La mise en scène expose par le biais de fouilles
archéologiques les restes d'une population; le texte, essentiellement
non-verbal, encourage une remise en cause de la primauté du document
écrit comme moyen de recréer la signification; l'emploi de
trois langues met en doute le principe de compatibilité entre scène
et spectateur; et la théâtralité souligne simultanément
des stéréotypes culturels et leur appropriation dans un contexte
nouveau.
Plays such as 25th Street Theatre's Paper Wheat, Marco Micone's Voiceless People or Denis Foon's New Canadian Kid present clashes at the frontiers of differing cultures in a multicultural Canada. In each case the myth of a dominant culture is tested against the reality of immigrant experience and almost as a reflex language is taken to be the defining principle of culture and the mode of conflict. Robert Lepage's La Trilogie des Dragons, 1 on the other hand, enacts confrontations between ethnicities in fundamentally non-linguistic ways, with the result that the very meanings of theatrical representation are investigated.
Lepage's approach to multiculturalism in this work is twofold. He depicts three generations chronologically and topographically as their representatives migrate or simply move-journey-travel westward from Chinatown in Quebec City, early in the century, to Toronto, to Vancouver and ultimately to Hong Kong in 1985. These human dimensions of space and time are circumscribed by the celestial rhythm of the passages of Halley's comet in 1910 and 1985. Lepage's mise en scène is an adaptation of the non-verbal ideograms of the Chinese game Mah Jongg, in which individualized time and space give way to a cyclical view of human activity, and individual ephemerality to the immutability of the universe. Consequently the stereotypes of the Chinese laundry man and the British businessman in La Trilogie allow for a transcendence of traditional concepts of language, time and place. The significance of Lepage's mise en scène lies in the way in which he employs cultural stereotypes both as a method of characterization and a way of subverting the audience's expectations of ethnicity.
The plot of La Trilogie des Dragons opens with the encounter between Québécois and Chinese in Canada during this century. The narrator character, who is also a mediator between these two cultures, is Mr. Crawford, a British shoe salesman who has spent part of his childhood in China. In the course of Crawford's narrative the spectators follow the lives of Jeanne and Françoise, from childhood to middle age. Initially the girls mock what is foreign to them, including the idiosyncratic proprietor of the local Chinese laundry. Their adult lives coincide with the Second World War. Françoise joins the army to see the world, while Jeanne bcomes pregnant by her lover Bédard, but is forced by her father into marriage with Lee, the laundryman's son. After the war Françoise settles down to family life in her native Quebec and Jeanne remains in 'exile' in Toronto, where she has spent the war. When Jeanne discovers that she has breast cancer, she refuses radio-and chemotherapy and hangs herself. She has already arranged to send her mentally-handicapped daughter Stella to a Quebec institution run by Catholic nuns, against the strong protests of her husband, who argues that the child ought to remain with him and be cared for by the family in the Chinese tradition.
In the final part of the trilogy, which brings us into the 1980s, Stella dies as a result of a sexual assault in the institution, and the story shifts from Françoise to her son Pierre. This shift also involves a change of place, to the West Coast. Pierre meets a young Japanese artist who brings her drawings of the three dragons to his gallery. This time of peace and prosperity affords him opportunities that his mother never had. He goes to China on a government grant. Finally, Crawford, the narrator, dies in an airplane crash en route from Vancouver to Hong Kong. Thus the plot opens out from an isolated French-Canadian culture into a multinational field.
Lepage has developed from this basic narrative an impressive and intensely active stage imagery visible in the various productions by Théâtre Repère.2 In his mise en scène Lepage elicits the meanings of the ideogrammatic playing tiles of Mah Jongg by means of the narratives of Jeanne's and Françoise's lives. The green dragon, ideogrammatically water and spring, is theatrically presented as the naïveté of childhood; the fire and summer of the red dragon are presented in terms of the conflicts of adult lives, including those of war; and air and autumn of the white dragon are portrayed as the calm of middle age and the spirituality of art. This theatrical architectonics is further developed in such brilliant metonymies as the use of shoes and shoeboxes in various ways, and by language and movement in performance.
Lepage wittily sets La Trilogie des Dragons on a quasi-archaeological site. The stage area is a sand-covered rectangle outlined by a wooden walkway. A small booth, a telephone pole and a billboard identify it as a parking lot. This highly flexible 'stage' affords the audience a point of entry into the exploration of ethnicity from three temporal perspectives, almost simultaneously: the historical and ancestral view is presented as artifacts dug from the sand; the ephemeral and contemporary are registered as imprints in the sand; and the future with its intangible sensibilities of multiculturalism, is a perspective from the air. Lepage begins the cycle by drawing attention to the possible significance of things found or footprints made in the carefully raked sand. By the end he traces human activity as if from above: in lights seen from the cockpit of a plane, in an artist's installation which represents no less than the Universe, and in the image of the ocean erasing the traces of the plane's passengers. The relative insignificance of written documents is alluded to by the Air France pilot who plunges the plane into 'la vaste nappe d'encre noire' (Jeu 78). 3 Between the minutiae and ephemerality of individual steps in the sand and the artistic representation of the infinite lies the substance of the play's narrative and imagery.
This attitude to creation, using everyday objects as resources for the theatre, was richly evident in the choice of a dockside warehouse where the production was mounted in Montreal in the fall of 1988. As the audience walked the length of this cavernous building to the bleachers, their echoing voices imparted a sense of mystery. By the time the audience reached the smoke-infused performance area they had already travelled through time. Lepage capitalized on the possibilities of an imaginative re-association of the spectators with their immediate surroundings when he revealed the adjacent shore and water. As Mr. Crawford, under the influence of opium, reminisced about his childhood, the doors of the warehouse opened to reveal all that he had described: a junk sailing by a wharf on which fires burned in large oil drums. Speaking from his wheelchair, Mr. Crawford presented a distorted visual image of the rickshaws of his youth in Hong Kong. This scene is the only one in the trilogy in which a Chinese setting is realistically depicted and it is a central one with vital links to other scenes. For instance, it recalls a scene in the first part of the trilogy where the Chinese laundry proprietor narrates a shadow play. On a screen made of a hoisted sheet the shadow of a junk evokes a land of memories, transporting the proprietor to the house of his ancestors where his dreams are sheltered. Two masked human figures, his sisters, emerge from behind the screen and dance, describing broad arcs with the beams of flashlights. Crawford's recollection of particular personal experience can be seen against the backdrop of an active culture that articulates the significance of collective memory. While Crawford's memory contains many of these same images, his travel through time is brought about by opium and is a reliving of a moment. This is contrasted with the expression of the Chinese sensibility revealed in the proprietor's mental link with his ancestors. As the doors closed behind Crawford, the audience realized that for him the foreignness of the China of his childhood had become the familiar solace of his old age. The workings of his imagination were expressed in a realistic portrayal whereas a symbolic method had been used for the Chinese proprietor's ritualistic play. In the West, it was suggested, the past is made to correspond to a present sense of reality, but Chinese perceptions of the past are conveyed through ritualised shadows. The ambiguity of Crawford's dream is the more poignant in that it occurs in the last play of the trilogy when all experience is filtered through some kind of ritual.4
The use of the flexible stage is related to Lepage's linguistic experimentation. From the beginning he problematizes the relation between verbal meanings and theatrical concepts. As the smoke thins on stage a prologue is given in French, English and Chinese, by unseen and unidentified voices from three sides of the stage:
I have never been to China
When I was small, there used to be houses here
This used to be Chinatown
Today, this is a parking lot
Later, perhaps it will become a park, a station or a
cemetery
If you scratch the ground with your nails
you are going to find water and motor oil
If you dig further
you are surely going to find pieces of porcelain and
jade
and the foundations of the houses of the Chinese that
used to live here
and if you dig still further
you are going to find yourself in China
When I die
it's in such a hole that I would like you to fling me
so that I fall eternally
So that I live eternally
Look at the old parking lot attendant
I tell you that he doesn't sleep
You might say he's the dragon
The dragon who guards the portals of immortality
He is the dragon and this is the.... 5
Into the darkness the stooped figure
of the parking lot attendant emerges from the booth. Carrying a garage
light on an extension cord, he crosses the carefully raked and as yet undisturbed
sand to find a glass bauble, takes in the audience with his gaze, and scratches
the sand with his fingers. This same figure of the attendant and the same
kind of reconnoitering of the parking lot, as though it were an archaeological
site, reappears in the epilogue six hours later.
In the course of the trilogy the argument of the trilingual prologue is split into other modes of presentation and much elaborated. The first part becomes the French-language dialogue between Pierre and his mother about his plans to study in China. The second part - about digging in the sand and discovering China - is transformed into Pierre's encounter with the Japanese artist who brings her drawings of the three Chinese dragons to his gallery. The immortality mentioned in the prologue is constituted by Crawford's 'return' to Hong Kong and Françoise's simple act of leaving a glass bauble in the sand to mark her friend's daughter's death. Thus the mise en scène supplements the purely verbal expression with acts and objects.
In this trilingual work, translations of passages of speech into either of the other two languages are limited to moments that relate to fundamental elements of the culture; otherwise the three languages are spoken quite naturally by their native speakers. Thus when the Chinese narrates the shadow play about his ancestry the speech is translated, but the Nun's reminiscences of her experience as a missionary in Mao's China are not. The Nun has brought documents for Stella's institutionalization and although she can speak Chinese she addresses Lee and his wife (who understands Chinese) in French. Lepage mixes the Nun's missionary enthusiasm with Jeanne's memories of her childhood in Quebec and in a bravura moment the Nun discourses on the significance of bicycles to the revolution in China. She does this as a kind of sermon to the masses, using the front carrier of a delivery bicycle as her pulpit, the bicycle circling the main acting area as she speaks (Jeu 65). Not insignificantly the bicycle is pedalled by Jeanne's lover, Bédard, and the Nun is played by the same actress who plays the silent Stella. The image and phenomenon of the bicycle-borne Nun present the significance of the moment from her own and from Jeanne's perspective simultaneously and with a powerful mimetic literalism.
As indicated, this theatrical presentation exploits the concepts depicted by the three dragon tiles in Mah Jongg. The first part, under the sign of the green dragon, is set in the small Quebec village of Saint Roch in the period 1910 to 1935, and it concerns the childhood and adolescence of Jeanne and Françoise. Their childish perceptions of the world are juxtaposed with those of the local Chinese laundry proprietor and Jeanne's father. Three scenes in this first part demonstrate ways of dealing with one's environment. Jeanne and Françoise play a parodic game in which each local residence is represented by a shoebox; the local Chinese laundry proprietor summons up the shadow play already mentioned to explain his arrival in Canada and his links to his ancestors; and Jeanne's father, the local barber, has a nightmare in which his dead wife appears in the guise of his daughter. The girls explore their world through representational dialogue and concrete props. Their understanding of the world is purely in terms of themselves and is always in the present. The barber's nightmare intimates an inability to cope psychologically with pain. It can also be interpreted as prophetic; not long afterwards the barber marries off Jeanne to settle a gambling debt incurred playing poker and Mah Jongg. These three sequences introduce the methods by which Lepage deploys different modes of presentation: ritualistic, mimetic and verbal images.
The second part, under the sign of the red dragon, encompasses the period from 1935 to 1960, and is set in Toronto and in Europe. It presents Jeanne and Françoise in the context of the Second World War and its aftermath. We note how the shoeboxes in the children's games in the first part are metamorphosed into the stock in Jeanne and Lee's shoestore on Toronto's Spadina Avenue, the barber's nightmare into images of devastation of the Second World War, while the method of the ritualistic Chinese shadow play has become the approach used to present the Western World's common experience of the War.
This depiction of the War's devastation is one of the most powerful images of the production. Music underscores all the action and not a single Word about the war is ever uttered. As a prelude to the battle scene Françoise explains the multinational character of 'Youkali,' Roger Fernay's French lyrics about a never-never-land of peace and happiness, set to Kurt Weill's tango. Her performance of 'Youkali' serves as a musical text for a series of mimed images. Midstage, on top of the parking lot booth, the figure of a geisha, resembling Puccini's Butterfly, collapses, devastated by the abandonment by her lover, an American naval officer who very clearly reiterates Pinkerton without being the operatic character. Downstage the two Québécois lovers, Jeanne and Bédard, dance slowly to the song in a tight embrace. These images are not immediately interpreted for the audience but are left as fictions of peace and happiness, ambiguity placed in a realistic and parodic context.
As the song ends Jeanne and Lee set out shoes on the sand as signifiers of peacetime activity, they run from grouping to grouping, miming, as appropriate, couples embracing, couples talking, and families out walking. Soon uniformed figures, Françoise and her fiancé, skate in silently to the melodies of the 'Skaters Waltz,' cutting figures through the sand, kicking the shoes into a pile of rubble in the middle of the stage. The use and re-use of the shoebox-shoe motif is central to Lepage's method of constructing with a few metonymically-used props a coherent theatrical imagery.
The return to civilian life is signalled by a return to a verbal text, but it is a mechanical one and suggests the impossibility of expressing the pain engendered by the war. As Jeanne sits atop the attendant's booth learning to type, following tape-recorded instructions, the typing exercise narrates the courtship of an American officer and a Japanese geisha, which is enacted below. The verbal text is in French only, but the visual one is the essence of Puccini's Madama Butterfly:
(Méthode): Il est venu, virgule, puis il est reparti, point. Puis il est reparti, point. Il a dit, deux points, ouvrez les guillemets, <<je reviendrai>>, ouvrez les guillemets, <<je reviendrai>>, fermez les guillements, point. Reviendra-t-il? Point d'interrogation. Personne ne l'a cru, point. Personne ne l'a cru, point.... (Jeu 63)
Each of these simple instructional
phrases is accompanied by the mechanically repeated actions carried out
by a uniformed male figure at the door of the booth. The emotional arias
of Puccini's opera are replaced by 'just the facts' of Pinkerton's coming
and going, and the promise of his return. The scene has some of the overtones
of a war correspondent at a typewriter and contrasts with the avoidance
of personal stories in the War scene. In this case Lepage borrows from
another artistic tradition to sketch the emotionally charged family background
of the young Japanese artist who will appear in Pierre's gallery in the
third part under the sign of the white dragon. Butterfly's story is similar
to the story Youkali will tell of her parentage. To her a sense of betrayal,
similar to but less romantic than in Puccini's opera, is the essence of
her anger towards her American-soldier father who abandoned her pregnant
mother, but a profounder American betrayal was the vaporization of Youkali's
mother at Hiroshima. Without a body to bury, Youkali has been advised to
bury one of her mother's possessions so that she can at least have a spot
at which to mourn; she has chosen a pair of red shoes. Any verbal statement
about the war would be as much a travesty as the teach-yourself-typing
course already mentioned.
Associated with air and autumn, the white dragon provides the structure for the final part, from 1960 to 1986, set in Vancouver and again in Saint-Roch. In this part only Françoise and her son speak the same language and the ability to express oneself through symbolic means becomes essential. One of the symbolic means is Pierre's installation: an art work symbolizing the universe uses lights laid out on the sand, which now represents an art gallery, with a circular neon bulb as the sun. He attempts to explain the symbolism of his installation to Youkali, conscious of the inadequacies of his knowledge of English: 'That's the sun. Pas the son of the mother, mais the sun of the universe. Mais seulement le symbole' (Jeu 75). While Pierre characterizes his art as cold, plugged into the wall, external to him, Youkali explains her drawings of the three Chinese dragons as expressions of her soul. Yet she responds to Pierre's work positively: 'But it touches me. I am working in the space inside, small. You are working with the space around us. You put the universe in a small room. And here, I feel safe, secure, safe in your universe' (Jeu 75).
This scene in a gallery gives way to a presentation of the yin and yang of human sexual relations in a Zen garden, and the traditional Japanese harvest dance. Even as Pierre explains the tradition, he and Youkali are at opposite corners of the performance area moving in the rhythm of the ritual in which giant ropes mate in the centre of the stage. Youkali explains, 'there's no losers and there's no winners' (Jeu 75) harkening back to the pedestrian representations by Jeanne and Françoise, or the conflicts of the War.
The concluding scene, before the epilogue, enacts another relationship between individual existence and collective memory. At this point the parking lot is redefined for the audience as the Pacific Ocean. As the pilot of an Air France jet en route to Hong Kong from Vancouver describes plunging his plane, on which Crawford is a passenger, into the water, the audience appreciates that the watery grave leaves the passengers poised between the enigmatic Orient and the banal West only hours before the opportunity to see Halley's comet. The pilot is conscious that his action will not leave any traces of the passengers for future generations. The crash is a fitting scene prior to a return to the parking lot of the prologue. The complex image of the loss of lives and loss of bodies confirms that not all human existence is as definite as footprints in the sand. This erasure of personal presence in the public arena echoes Youkali's burial of her mother's shoes in place of a body and looks forward to the representation of Stella's presence as a glass bauble left in the sand. Thus when the personal stories of the characters are reduced to objects the audience is reminded of the complexity of contextualizing objects as cultural artifacts.
La Trilogie stems from an inquiry into traces of ethnicity and has evolved from observation of the distinct modes for which Lepage has found brilliant theatrical metonymies. Lepage concentrates on presenting distinct cultural perspectives and modes of expression rather than crude conflict of cultures. Concrete objects serve as resources for his work, as a theatrical palette, and each of these objects is interpreted through the perceptions of the characters. The audience has to interpret shoes, a glass bauble, a small booth and even footprints in the sand as performative artifacts with highly variable meanings; their repeated recontextualizations in new historical, cultural and personal narratives in La Trilogie constitute a performance of cultures in the theatre. In effect, Lepage has reoriented this performance which is customarily a matter of individual intellect to a representation of a collective intellect, which as Yurij Lotman points out, is 'secondary to the individual intellect (structurally, not historically) and presupposes its existence.' 6 The international reception of this production attests to his penetrating insights.
Notes
CLICHÉS OF ETHNICITY SUBVERTED: ROBERT LEPAGE'S LA TRILOGIE DES DRAGONS
Natalie Rewa
1 La Trilogie des dragons
has met with critical acclaim in Canada, the USA, France, Australia and
Ireland. A version of La Trilogie was first presented in 1985, and
in 1987 the full six-hour version premièred in Montreal. It won
awards for best production and for best female performers at the Festival
de Théâtre des Amériques, and the Quebec and Ottawa
critics' associations both chose it as the year's best play. In Sept 1988
a co-production by Théâtre Repère and the Festival
de Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal sold out for 10
performances before opening night. In the spring of 1989 part of the trilogy
toured London, Paris, Brussels, Wroclaw, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Hamburg,
and the following spring went to Winnipeg and Chicago.
Since 1984, when he
joined the four-year-old Théâtre Repère, Lepage has
developed theatrical works from diverse origins. Circulations (1984)
used a road map of the North Eastern United States and a teach-yourself-English
record. Tectonic Plates (1988) explored cultural and political differences
between North Americans and Europeans from the concept of Continental Drift.
(By spring 1990 the script was rewritten for a three-hour performance in
which interpersonal intimacy, depicted as intercultural relationships,
was equated with, and indeed represented by the movements of the continents.)
In 1988 Lepage used a lie detector and the Berlin Wall as points of departure
for Polygraphe
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2 Théâtre
Repère's method of creation was inspired by LAWRENCE HALPRIN's RSVP
cycles. The name of the company is an adaptation of Halprin's approach
to creation: 'Re' stands for the use of tangible resources, 'p' for partition,
meaning to compose the performance as if it were a musical score, 'e' for
evaluation, and 're' for representation. Halprin, a professional environmental
designer and planner, developed this system of notation in the late 1960s
with his wife Ann, director of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop, as a
way of integrating human activity into a natural environment. A detailed
description of the RSVP cycles can be found in LAWRENCE HALPRIN's The
RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (George Braziller
Inc, New York rpt 1976)
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3 All quotations are from
the special issue of Jeu, no 45 (1987). Since the performance text
of La Trilogie des dragons has not been published I have used DIANE
PAVLOVIC's 'Reconstruction de la Trilogie' (Jeu 45, p 40-42) as
a guide to the performance I saw
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4 It is no less important
to remark that this scene in the third part of the trilogy ties together
many loose ends. Lepage explains that he conceived it as a way of completing
the cycle of personal association with Halley's comet (Jeu 45, p
130). Crawford, who saw the comet in his childhood in 1910, is still alive
in 1985 when the comet is about to reappear. His opium-induced illusion
links him to Jeanne's daughter Stella, who was so named because of her
mother's fascination with Françoise's account of her mother's
seeing the comet in 1910. Significantly, Stella not only resembles a comet
with her long red hair and very brief life, but because of her autism remains
seemingly outside the main action
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5 The prologue has been
published in French (Jeu 45, p 38). The English translation is mine
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6 Y M LOTMAN, 'Culture
as Collective Intellect and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence,' trans
Ann Shukman, p 88, in Dramatic Structure: Poetics and Cognitive Semantics,
series Russian Poets in Translation, (Oxford: RPT Publications
rpt 1988).
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