Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work

Heir to the écriture scénique introduced by theatre’s modern movement, director Robert Lepage’s scenography is his entry point when re-envisioning an extant text. Due to widespread interest in the Québécois auteur’s devised offerings, however, Lepage’s highly visual interpretations of canonical works remain largely neglected in current scholarship. My paper seeks to address this gap, theorizing Lepage’s approach as a three-pronged ‘scenographic dramaturgy’, composed of historical-spatial mapping, metamorphous space and kinetic bodies. By referencing a range of Lepage’s extant text productions and aligning elements of his work to historical and contemporary models of scenography-driven performance, this project will detail how the three components of Lepage’s scenographic dramaturgy ‘write’ meaning-making performance texts.