People are Talking: UMS Night School – Session 4
Posted: 3/9/12 -- 5:09 pm
by The UMS Lobby
UMS Night School is a free and open to the public series of “classes”, which include a 30-minute discussion of each performance in Pure Michigan Renegade, plus a 60-minute intro session for the next performance on the series. You’ll find follow-up conversation, coverage, and materials here on the Lobby.
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SYLLABUS
HOMEWORK
“Required Reading” and “Required Watching” from Malcolm Tulip, Associate Professor of Theatre at U-M
1. The Turnip Princess: a newly-discovered fairy tale
“Once upon a time, the historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected fairytales in Bavaria, which were locked away in an archive until now.”
2. Interview with Robert Lepage for Theatre Music Canada.
In Lypsinch (2007) Lepage intends to “show us a mosaic of human struggles for identity, to assemble a composite portrait of contemporary society voicing over and dubbing out our primal emotional needs. Lepage wants to make us aware of how we control and doctor the sounds surrounding us to cover up the voices of those in genuine need.” via Village Voice
3. Director Robert Lepage Speaks on what inspired him to create The Nightingale & Other Short Fables, a collection of works by composer Igor Stravinsky that made its world premier in October 2009.
4. More about The Andersen Project
A slideshow of images from the production
Preview in Paris Voice: “the piece is not a retelling of any one of Anderson’s tales but rather an open-ended study, undertaken to examine, create around and perhaps finally understand better both the creator and his work.”
5. More about Hans Christian Andersen
The Hans Christian Andersen Center (with complete works)
The Dryad
The Shadow
Elsewhere on the Lobby:
Our interview with The Andersen Project’s lead actor Yves Jacques, and 5 Things to Know About The Andersen Project.
YOU SUGGESTED…
We’ll add your suggestions for further reading, listening, and watching here.
What did you think of this session of Night School? What’s still not making sense? What are you excited about?
5/20/13 at 2:27 pm 
A Theater of Images
Somehow Robert Lepage’s Andersen Project has slipped under the cultural radar. A pity. Surely Lepage’s work merits some of the same attention and buildup that Einstein on the Beach got at the start of this calendar year. Maybe it’s bad timing. March is a tough month in A2, and this piece—which, to judge from the slide show on its website (http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/theatre/the_andersen_project/), is visually every bit as ravishing and provocative as Einstein—is squeezed between last week’s CSO and Max Raabe, and next week’s SF Symphony. Never mind March Madness.
As UM’s Malcolm Tulip reminded the class at yesterday’s Night School session, Lepage is the real deal: a theatrical visionary whose risk-taking stagecraft is the stuff of playgoers’ dreams and actors’ nightmares. (Witness the infamous “machine” at the heart of Lepage’s Ring Cycle currently playing the Met.) Said Tulip, “Lepage is willing to imagine it and make it happen. He’s fearless. He uses anything at his disposal.”
A2 audiences who saw Far Side of the Moon here a couple of seasons ago may remember the eloquent and often whimsical stage pictures Lepage creates. A moon that turns into a front-loading washing machine that turns into a spaceship … “This is a theater of images, not of psychology,” said Tulip. “Lepage shows not only what is but what can be.” It’s the sort of theater a hearing-impaired audience would relish—where images communicate as much, if not more, information than words.
It’s a bit hard to get a sense of what the Andersen Project really is from the advance copy: an iconoclastic director’s take on an iconoclastic writer (Hans Christian Andersen), set in Paris—past and present—with ruminations on fame and recognition, sexual identity, the clash between romanticism and modernism. All of this generated by a pair of Andersen fairy tales (“The Dryad” and “The Shadow”). No matter what it turns out to be, I know Lepage will provoke in ways that turn my imagination loose, and I can’t wait. We’re lucky to have this show in our midst.
Leslie Stainton
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