887 – Holland Festival

Why do we remember trivial things like the tune of an old television advert but not our own telephone number? In the autobiographical solo 887 (the house number of his family home) theatrical magician Robert Lepage examines how our memory functions. With his cinematic, immersive theatre-making style, Lepage transports the audience to his childhood in the Québec City of the 1960s. He himself performs on stage, next to an impressive scale model of his childhood home, and tells about a family’s struggle to emerge from the working class and about his coming out, and he connects these stories to Québec’s liberation struggle. Lepage’s theatre is intimate, melancholic, and moving. Programme

The Canadian theatre maker Robert Lepage has made his name since the 1990s with performances acclaimed for their vision and technical innovation. Lepage's theatre is usually packed with innovative theatre techniques, epic stories and appealing

characters. Two of the high points in his oeuvre are The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) – about Hiroshima, concentration camps and AIDS – and the solo The Far Side of the Moon (2000), a story about two rival brothers set in the context of the cold war and the space race. Lepage was at the Holland Festival three years ago, with the multimedia spectacle Playing Cards: SPADES. Now he is returning with 887, one of the most personal stories in his career.

Lepage combines personal anecdotes with rapid scene changes and a captivating stage presence in 887. He tells an autobiographical story that with significance beyond the personal. 887 is about how our memory works and how every individual's life can be seen in the light of the public narrative of history.

887 is the house number of the apartment complex on Murray Avenue in Quebec City, where Lepage grew up in the 1960s. He created a man-sized replica of the complex for the performance. Lepage is a giant next to his family home. He tells anecdotes about his quarrelling neighbours and his father, who tried to make ends meet as a taxi driver to support his family; and about his grandmother who had Alzheimer's disease.

But Lepage would not be Lepage if there was merely a text. The residents of the apartment complex are brought to life using miniature animation, puppetry in meticulously decorated dolls' living rooms, a radio-controlled car and video images. Lepage sometimes uses his smartphone to make live images. From his – literally – lofty perspective as a grown man, he uses small scenes to show life as a francophone child in the Canada of the 1960s.

A personal narrative becomes political when Lepage brings the Front de Libération du Québec into his story. The struggle for an independent Quebec rose to fever pitch in the 1960s, when the Front developed into a terrorist organisation. The Lepage family's life was affected by the struggle for independence and the corresponding linguistic conflict. Lepage, who calls himself a 'part-time separatist', explains the political context of the conflict in this work, without losing sight of the personal element. For instance, a recurring feature is his traumatic memory of the time he could not memorise the words of the Québécois protest poem Speak White, written by Michèle Lalonde, for a recital. 'Speak White' is a discriminatory insult that was used by Anglophone Canadians at the time against those who spoke other languages.

Lepage argues that the Front de Libération du Québec and the wider separatist movement did not arise from animus towards the Anglophone population, but that the struggle for independence was above all a class struggle. The French-speakers were almost always poor workers. All the bosses and rulers spoke English, whether with an American or a British accent. Lepage is emphatically not preaching separatism with 887. He simply wants to keep the memory alive.

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text, design, direction, performance Robert Lepage translation Louisa Blair creative direction, design Steve Blanchet dramaturgy Peder Bjurman assistant director Adèle Saint-Amand music design, sound design Jean-Sébastien Côté lighting design Laurent Routhier images design Félix Fradet-Faguy associate set design Sylvain Décarie props Ariane Sauvé costumes Jeanne Lapierre production manager Marie-Pierre Gagné production assistant Véronique St-Jacques technical manager Paul Bourque tour manager Samuel Sauvageau technical director-touring Olivier Bourque stage manager Nadia Bélanger sound manager Olivier Marcil light manager Renaud Pettigrew multimedia integration & video manager Nicolas Dostie costumes & properties manager Isabel Poulin head stagehand Chloé Blanchet technical consultants Tobie Horswill, Catherine Guay acting consultant - creative process Reda Guerinik director's agent Lynda Beaulieu production Ex Machina commissioned by Parapan Am Games, The Arts and Culture Program of the TORONTO 2015 Pan Am coproduction le lieu unique, Nantes; La Comète - Scène nationale de Châlons-en-Champagne, Edinburgh International Festival, Århus Festuge, Théâtre de la Ville–Paris, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Romaeuropa Festival, Bonlieu Scène nationale d’Annecy, Ysarca Art Promotions, Célestins – Théâtre de Lyon, SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs, Fraser University's 50th Anniversary, Le Théâtre français du Centre national des Arts d’Ottawa, Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Canadian Stage, Théâtre du Trident, La Coursive Scène nationale de la Rochelle, Le Volcan – scène nationale du Havre, The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Bergen International Festival, Holland Festival, Chekhov International Theatre Festival – Moscow producer Ex Machina Michel Bernatchez assistence Vanessa Landry-Claverie, Valérie Lambert Ex Machina is funded by Canadese Raad voor de Kunsten, Quebec's Arts and Literature Council, de stad Quebec associate production Australia

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Breakfast lecture: 887

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