Robert Lepage Quotes

Sylvie Guillem is the best dancer in the world.

We should never overestimate an audience‘s culture, but we should never underestimate their intelligence.

I enjoy juggling four or five different projects in the air and finding connections and disconnections between them.

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!

I want to be surprised by life… I think that’s more interesting.

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.

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.

Theatre comes alive when someone cross-dresses onstage.

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.

Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don’t see it like that.

I’ve always been a little scared of technology, which is why I explore it.

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.

I’m a follower of people not necessarily connected with the theater.

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.

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.

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.

I am interested in suffering and, in particular, the Buddhist idea that in pain, you can find beauty.

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.’

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.’

I need to have many things cooking at the same time.

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.

When we work on a new theatre piece, we improvise a lot. But it’s the opposite in opera, where everything is fixed.

I was brought up by a father and mother who were radically different.

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.

If Darwin‘s theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.

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.

I’m not good at entertainment. I don’t give myself to all the interviews, game shows, or talk shows.

In everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to make room for indigenous people, to include them.

Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.

Technology can become a crutch. Sometimes it’s there just to hide behind when you’re shy of what you’re trying to say.

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.

The important thing is not to know where you are going, to be open to accidents. That’s what keeps it fun.

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.

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.

Chaos is a good thing.

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.

We have a tendency in Quebec – and I include myself in this – to describe ourselves using the past. We’re always nostalgic.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

Opera is a very stimulating place to work, and I believe it offers the most intense theatrical experience possible.

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.

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.’

Nothing is worse than having your dreams come true.

Opera needs a major makeover; the large opera houses are too in thrall to their conservative patrons.

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.