For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s KÁ in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.
The book’s title references the experimentation so integral to Lepage’s creative process and the ways in which he and his creative arts company, Ex Machina, have always been attuned to the synergistic possibilities that emerge when art encounters science and technology. Whether as a playwright, actor, film director, or stage director, Lepage is forever in search of new mutations of form and expression, and his unexpected narratives often write themselves out of discoveries he makes when staging a piece – indeed stagecraft often guides story in Lepage’s creative realm.
This full-colour volume will be of keen interest for theatre practitioners of all kinds, from set designers to directors, from academics to fans.

Ludovic Fouquet is a visual artist, teacher, director, and founder of the multimedia theatre company songes mécaniques (Mechanical Dreams) in Blois, France. After training as an actor and dancer, Fouquet earned his PhD studying Robert Lepage’s artistic practice and its relationship to technology.He contributed to the publication of La trilogie des dragons (The Dragons’ Trilogy, L’instant même, 2005). With Robert Faguy of Laval University, he wrote a practical book about the use of stage video, Face à l’image. Exercices, explorations, et expériences vidéoscéniques (L’instant même, forthcoming 2015). He prepared a photographic monograph of Lepage’s work (to be published).Since 2000, he has given numerous workshops about the use of image on stage (theatre, visual arts, circus performance) at universities and schools or conservatories, including Laval University’s visual arts school and theatre department (Quebec), Université Censier-Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris), École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique (Paris), and École du Cirque de Québec.In addition to frequent speaking engagements at French and Quebec universities, Fouquet contributes regularly to numerous theatre and contemporary art magazines, including JEU revue de théâtre and ETC Montréal.

Ludovic Fouquet's profile page

Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’ The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Novels she has translated were contenders for CBC Canada Reads in 2015 and 2019 and one was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.

Rhonda Mullins' profile page

“Fouquet’s impressively detailed observations reveal the alchemy taking place in Lepage’s ‘visual laboratory,’ as well as key influences that have driven his innovative, imagistic theatre from its beginnings … This book both reintroduces Lepage to scholarship and reminds us of the central position Lepage occupies in contemporary theatre practice.”
– James Reynolds

“The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage is essential reading for anybody interested in new-media performance and represents a valuable next step in the research of Lepage’s theatricality.”
– Aleksander Saŝa Dundjerovic

“In illuminating Lepage’s methods of creation (where the text often appears only at the end of a process of collective improvisation), [Fouquet] explores the wealth of the playwright’s work as well as his occasional failures.”
– Marie Labrecque, author of Une longue, longue marche

“This book will be of great value to those interested in understanding the evolution of Lepage’s creativity, as well as to artists, teachers, and students making their own work with Lepage’s practice as inspiration.”
– Karen Fricker

“Ludovic Fouquet, in addition to being an avid spectator at many of Robert Lepage’s shows in Quebec and Europe, has been a privileged witness to the working sessions of the prolific playwright and attended many hours of rehearsal during research for this book.”
– Louise Vigeant, JEU: revue de théâtre