“In everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to make room for indigenous people, to include them.”
― Robert Lepage
“We should never overestimate an audience’s culture, but we should never underestimate their intelligence.”
― Robert Lepage
“In real life, I am not a lonely person; I have lots of good friends and am active socially. But there are certain aspects of my life when I have felt very alone, utterly alone, and one of them is when I am performing on my own.”
― Robert Lepage
“A puppet, for example, is just a piece of wood, a couple of rivets, but put them together, and if you know how to do it, and the audience’s imagination joins in with this, then a miracle will come out of that machine. That is what we and the audience do in the theatre – we create miracles in that space.”
― Robert Lepage
“It’s obvious that any new show comes with its share of blunders, misfires, and bad choices.”
― Robert Lepage
“The great advantage of the circus, and the reason it is so popular, is really the ideal combination of art and sport. It’s the ideal art form, in a certain way, if you want to be accessible.”
― Robert Lepage
“Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that’s its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.”
― Robert Lepage
“Theatre is different. We can spend two weeks around a table talking about subtext. In opera, there is a score, and people already know their parts. And they move differently. I find all this liberating.”
― Robert Lepage
“People think that it is negative, but in fact, chaos can be very fertile.”
― Robert Lepage
“Vegas is a testing ground for the human soul. What are our values, especially in a time of crisis? Work with Cirque du Soleil, and you learn that quickly. The former socialist street performers who now throw parties by the pool with Brazilian models, oh yes!”
― Robert Lepage
“The important thing is not to know where you are going, to be open to accidents. That’s what keeps it fun.”
― Robert Lepage
“I was a privileged observer to be there when Celine Dion opened at Caesars Palace and then the second Gulf War started. It was an odd thing to see the impact both events had on Vegas. The place was riding high after Celine, but overnight, once war was declared, it was deserted.”
― Robert Lepage
“My naivety is to assume people will think there’s compassion and solidarity in wanting to play someone even though we are not them.”
― Robert Lepage
“With the social media phenomenon, where people’s opinions inform so much of what we do with our lives, where the number of ‘likes’ decides what we should program, I cringe.”
― Robert Lepage
“The thing that’s interesting about Trump is that when you read ‘Coriolanus,’ you’d be tempted to draw parallels. But I don’t do that.”
― Robert Lepage
“The extraordinary context of ‘Coriolanus’ is that it’s the first republic – it’s the first attempt to create a society not ruled by a monarch. It changes the whole system, and you see how the establishment reacts to that, how they have disdain but play along – and you recognize this is the whole American republican system.”
― Robert Lepage
“There’s not a system better than another. There are some people better than others. I’m not anti-democracy, but there’s no real system yet that has proven itself to be the right one.”
― Robert Lepage
“I never went through a gender identity problem, but I did with my sexuality.”
― Robert Lepage
“I never questioned if I was effeminate or not. That didn’t matter in the theatre.”
― Robert Lepage
“When I went into the conservatory at 17, then I was able to open up and accept everything about myself and show my feminine side as well as my masculine.”
― Robert Lepage
“There is a way to grow old and still have dignity.”
― Robert Lepage
“As a kid, my dad moved us to the upper town, which was in a higher class of people, and we would see the lower town below. Every day, we could see where we came from and where we were now.”
― Robert Lepage
“I never thought of my father when I was growing up. Truly. He was a strong, silent man who worked hard to support his family.”
― Robert Lepage
“I always thought I was more of a mommy’s boy, because she was charming, talkative, a great storyteller. But as I dug back into my past, I realized I am exactly like my father on so many levels, although I never thought I inherited anything from him.”
― Robert Lepage
“My father had barely any education. He could hardly write or count. But his great pride was that he was perfectly bilingual. In the household, he entertained this idea that we had to speak both languages.”
― Robert Lepage
“If you decide to work with the opera world, chances are there are going to be people who resist that.”
― Robert Lepage
“The safety prospects in ‘Ka’ are the highest in the world.”
― Robert Lepage
“The first ‘Ring’ in Bayreuth was about the poetical world, the mythological world.”
― Robert Lepage
“I had been warned by other directors that opera is hell. The singers don’t want to do what you want.”
― Robert Lepage
“A lot of people hated every moment of my ‘Ring.’ And a lot of people who had never been to an opera bought subscriptions to the next season.”
― Robert Lepage
“In Las Vegas, you confront yourself with your darkest desires, because they’re all possible there.”
― Robert Lepage
“Everybody loves Vegas, and everybody puts it down, especially intellectuals and artists. We have to rub our feet on it, but we’re all secretly thrilled to be there.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’m not good at entertainment. I don’t give myself to all the interviews, game shows, or talk shows.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’m not good at doing show business; I’m a theatre person. I don’t reveal anything about my life.”
― Robert Lepage
“Nothing is worse than having your dreams come true.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’m a follower of people not necessarily connected with the theater.”
― Robert Lepage
“For me, theater will always be very, very much alive, but not necessarily in the theatrical tradition.”
― Robert Lepage
“My taste comes from when I was 12 years old and saw Genesis or Laurie Anderson or some performance artist who had put paint on himself. I’ve seen a lot of theater, but that’s not what woke up my taste to become a director; nontheatrical things were much more theatrical than the theater I was seeing.”
― Robert Lepage
“A show is good when there is a meeting of time and space, when time and space become irrelevant.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’ve always been a little scared of technology, which is why I explore it.”
― Robert Lepage
“Theater originated with technology. People forget that.”
― Robert Lepage
“The first time someone stood up in front of the fire and told the story while illustrating it with shadows on the walls of the quarry, that was the birth of theater.”
― Robert Lepage
“Technology can become a crutch. Sometimes it’s there just to hide behind when you’re shy of what you’re trying to say.”
― Robert Lepage
“’The Blue Dragon’ uses very filmic language and involves a lot of technology. It is more cinematic than theatrical and was inspired by comic strips and graphic novels.”
― Robert Lepage
“When we were working on ‘River Ota’ in the ’90s, I learnt to read Japanese, which was how I discovered that it incorporates elements of Chinese calligraphy.”
― Robert Lepage
“When we work on a new theatre piece, we improvise a lot. But it’s the opposite in opera, where everything is fixed.”
― Robert Lepage
“Opera is a very stimulating place to work, and I believe it offers the most intense theatrical experience possible.”
― Robert Lepage
“I will always demand the right for theatre to talk about anything and anyone. Without exception. None.”
― Robert Lepage
“The same critics who destroyed ‘Seven Streams’ when we opened in Edinburgh – and yes, it was horrible – called it one of the most important shows of the 21st century six years later in London.”
― Robert Lepage
“All of Vegas is false. There’s a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad – in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It’s ‘Aladdin,’ the sands, ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’”
― Robert Lepage
“I like doing very small, intimate things in the morning and then, in the afternoon, to be working on something in a big stadium.”
― Robert Lepage
“I need to have many things cooking at the same time.”
― Robert Lepage
“I studied as an actor at the theatre conservatoire in Quebec, but by the time I got to my third year, I was more interested in directing. There’s more to it than helping actors get round a stage: it’s a wonderful way of telling stories.”
― Robert Lepage
“Opera should be a place for art forms to meet. I’ve worked a lot with Peter Gabriel; his music isn’t operatic, but he creates big, popular gatherings to which architecture, dance, and music are all invited.”
― Robert Lepage
“Opera needs a major makeover; the large opera houses are too in thrall to their conservative patrons.”
― Robert Lepage
“When I directed the ‘Ring’ cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York recently, there were people texting all through the show. But theatre isn’t a communication device: it’s a communion.”
― Robert Lepage
“Chaos is a good thing.”
― Robert Lepage
“Often, particularly towards the end of the process, I think of myself less as a theatre director and more as someone who just directs the traffic. My job is to move the ideas and bits of the show into the places where they work best. Sometimes my job is also to say, ‘No.’”
― Robert Lepage
“Making art in big cities is often frustrating and difficult. It’s why artists are drawn to smaller places.”
― Robert Lepage
“Reading fairytales to children expands their imaginations.”
― Robert Lepage
“I wouldn’t be happy to be a specialist. There are some very interesting artists in history who refused to be nailed down into a category, like Da Vinci or Jean Cocteau. You could say Cocteau was a great poet but also a film-maker, interested in theatre, sculpture, and could never identify with any of these forms exclusively.”
― Robert Lepage
“Without meaning to sound crass, I’ve never had any psychological… help. It’s because I feel my work is so revealing about who I am and what I am trying to understand about myself. It’s a therapeutic process.”
― Robert Lepage
“If you’re going to do a show about somebody who dumped you, it’s much richer if you have three characters dealing with different aspects of that theme. There is more space for people to identify with it.”
― Robert Lepage
“I think theatre must be an event, an experience, not compete with cinema. When people are able to download stories on Netflix, you need to give them a good reason to jump into the car and drive two hours. It has to be something you can only see in the theatre, and it has to be worth it.”
― Robert Lepage
“Theatre’s still expensive compared to downloading on Netflix; that has to be addressed. It doesn’t mean it has to be over-subsidised by the state, but it’s something we’re trying to figure out.”
― Robert Lepage
“Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’m trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there’s an echo to a much larger reality.”
― Robert Lepage
“I remember my first review in London said I was the next Peter Brook. I said: ‘No way. I’m not Peter Brook. I don’t have the maturity, the experience, the intelligence. Don’t burden me.’”
― Robert Lepage
“During the tour of ‘Circulations,’ we spent a lot of time in Canadian Chinatowns. I was fascinated by the idea that you can cross the road and enter this dream world, this vision of China.”
― Robert Lepage
“I don’t think there is any kind of magic about what I do. All of the connections are there, somewhere in the subconscious or in the collective unconscious. If I let the elements speak to each other, then these coincidences will happen. And they do happen. They happen all the time.”
― Robert Lepage
“Of course I had friends, but it was very limiting because there was always a chance that at every corner, someone would be laughing at me or waiting to beat me up. I had a very lonely childhood because of that.”
― Robert Lepage
“I am interested in suffering and, in particular, the Buddhist idea that in pain, you can find beauty.”
― Robert Lepage
“Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don’t see it like that.”
― Robert Lepage
“The real writing of a piece comes only when you are performing it. It is why I like theatre. In film and TV, the image is locked forever, but in theatre, there is constant change; each performance is part of the writing process.”
― Robert Lepage
“I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve ‘Uncle Vanya’ or find a solution for ‘Henry V.’ Plays aren’t puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.”
― Robert Lepage
“I admire people who can spend every aspect of their life in one discipline and really go all the way. I feel the only way I could achieve some type of excellence is if I connect to other people, other disciplines.”
― Robert Lepage
“I can’t really define myself as a dramatist or as an actor or as someone who is interested in music.”
― Robert Lepage
“I was interested in theatre, and the only experience that I had in high school was as an actor. But when I got in Conservatoire, my teachers would give me a lot of flack because I wasn’t rehearsing my lines; I’d be doing stage management. I was interested in sound. I was interested in architecture. I was interested in every aspect of theatre.”
― Robert Lepage
“I enjoy juggling four or five different projects in the air and finding connections and disconnections between them.”
― Robert Lepage
“People talk about fantastic memories of childhood, but I remember children being cruel to me and wanting to come out of childhood as soon as possible because I knew adults were generally more contained in their cruelty.”
― Robert Lepage
“Every time we make a new invention, we think we’re going to save the world, but eventually, we understand that the real virtues of that new invention have mostly to do with commerce. Then we feel a huge emptiness, and we want to fill it with beauty.”
― Robert Lepage
“Cirque du Soleil distinguished itself by being a circus with no animals. Before then, circus was partly about showing how man can tame other species.”
― Robert Lepage
“If Darwin’s theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.”
― Robert Lepage
“Usually, on Broadway or in Hollywood, you come up with a project, and you have to convince the producers that it’s safe.”
― Robert Lepage
“When we did ‘The Dragons’ Trilogy,’ China was a big, mysterious piece of rock that we never thought would even move. It was impenetrable, impossible to deal with.”
― Robert Lepage
“I’ve always had a passion for geography. Even at a very young age.”
― Robert Lepage
“In Grade 2, when we had to do a presentation in front of the class, I’d always do things about Ireland or Italy. I could draw maps; I could name all the capitals: I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it’s a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious.”
― Robert Lepage
“We have a tendency in Quebec – and I include myself in this – to describe ourselves using the past. We’re always nostalgic.”
― Robert Lepage
“You’re only as good as your last movie, period. It’s a business.”
― Robert Lepage
“Theatre comes alive when someone cross-dresses onstage.”
― Robert Lepage
“Sylvie Guillem is the best dancer in the world.”
― Robert Lepage
“We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.”
― Robert Lepage
“I was brought up by a father and mother who were radically different.”
― Robert Lepage
“Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?”
― Robert Lepage
“I want to be surprised by life… I think that’s more interesting.”
― Robert Lepage
“There’s nothing sadder than when things happen the way you’ve planned them, because we don’t have a lot of imagination, you know.”
― Robert Lepage
“Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of ‘Gilligan’s Island?’ Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can’t remember the names of important collaborators?”
― Robert Lepage
“I haven’t become a satanist, but I am fascinated by the character of the devil.”
― Robert Lepage
“Vegas is the city of temptation. I think, perhaps, it is an experiment by NASA. If we’re going to send people to Mars, how will we create false economies and cultures to satisfy them? Vegas has the answer. People go there when they’ve nothing left to lose.”
― Robert Lepage
“I don’t disagree with the critics often, and I’m not destroyed by bad criticism anymore. There comes a point when you go beyond it.”
― Robert Lepage
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