sM | In his narration, Alberto Manguel said that “The private library is the autobiography of its reader.” What might someone walking through your private library deduce about you as an artist and individual?

RL — Well, it’s extremely well organized, but I’m not the organizer! Every new theatre project or cultural project comes with a huge amount of research, so I don’t only have theatre books in my library, I have a wide variety of texts. Every project comes with its own continent; oftentimes, I will need to know not only about costumes and sets and period music, but about humanity and psychology. I have geography books, architecture books, and many more. So, it’s a very large, very rich library with a lot of references that needs a lot of guidance. I think people would be a bit shocked to see it; there are so many colour codes! Also, I have a large collection of magazines that I use. There is a full collection of Life magazines, from around 1946 right up to the last published, probably near the beginning of the 2000s, I would guess. There are as many magazines in that library as there are what we might call “serious books!”

sM | It was recently announced that you will be narrating a partly-autobiographical one-man-show, Courville. What are the inspirations behind this project, particularly the use of Bunraku puppetry on stage?

RL — I’ve always been interested in puppets. I’ve staged a few puppet shows, I’ve done opera with puppets, so I know a lot about them but I’ve never been a puppeteer myself or performed with them! In that way, it feels like a bit of a danger-zone, because there are still so many things for me to understand about the craft. Courville is set in the 1970s and it’s about those teenage years, but it’s not like your typical American movie about teenage life. Of course, you can’t talk about that period of time without some of the usual suspects, but it’s a very mature approach and analysis of what teenage years are about, both in my own experiences and in general.

A child has debates and inner conflicts between his head and his heart, but when adolescence arrives, suddenly sexuality comes in and it’s like you become pulled in three different directions. That’s also what a Bunraku puppet is all about; it’s a puppet that is manipulated by three people, representing different levels of consciousness. Of course, the three parts strive to work in harmony—to make the puppet behave realistically—but at times the puppet is torn between contradicting forces and I’ve always been fascinated by that. I thought how interesting it would be, instead of having an actor showing the torture of this time, to have this poetic being who is tortured by inner consciousness.

There’s also the pivotal question of the body on stage. If you want to talk about the awakening of sexual desires in teenagers on stage, you can’t do that with a teenage actor; the evolution of the body is so important, and by using a puppet or a dummy, you have more leeway to explore and express that in a way that’s appropriate. Also, a puppet is a poetic being. You cannot talk about life and love and death in the same way if it’s filtered through a puppet, and I was very intrigued by that idea. It allows me to move into a more surreal world; puppets allow you to float about, dismantle, and do all these crazy things that you can’t really do to the same extent with an actor. Additionally, the main character recounting these stories is a painter and a sculptor, so it would be natural for him to want to sculpt the story of his younger years.

sM | What is your advice to young directors and playwrights in their 20s and 30s who are facing a unique set of challenges with the pandemic, in terms of maintaining their creative independence as well as career stability?

RL — I think that within the arts, we have this concept of what a theatre company is, how you should create it, and the relationship and hierarchy that needs to exist between writers, directors, and actors. To fund these companies and have freedom within the economic system, we follow the example of our peers and the people who’ve been there before us. However, when we started to do what we do in the mid 80s, there was no money for us; there was no structure and there were no subsidies, so we had to invent a new way to find our economic independence. By chance, we started to play in festivals in Toronto, and then other festivals around Canada, and eventually festivals around the world. By doing so, we discovered a wealth of audiences who identify with what we do and who truly love our work. By not thinking “locally” in that sense, we were able to find freedom, because the funding and the partnership of our projects comes predominantly from abroad. It comes from collaborations between other cities and Canada, so we're not too concerned about or reliant upon the local economic reality.

I think that today a lot of young companies believe their audience is their city, their neighbourhood. Hopefully that’s part of it, but maybe your audience is somewhere else. Maybe it’s in some other country where people identify more strongly with what you do, and sometimes they will have the means to help you. Very early on in the development of the company, we didn’t get that many subsidies. Now we have more because we are some 20 or 30 years old, so it changes with time. Though we still only get around 20 percent of our funding from federal and provincial sources, and the rest is from international collaborations. There’s a whole world out there, but a lot of people in Canada don't think that they're worthy of interest to somebody in another province or country. There’s a huge community of people, even beyond language barriers. Your audience may be somewhere else, and from the moment you start thinking that way, you connect.

In the 80s, we didn’t have the internet or the means that younger artists have today, to liaise and to find connections. And yet, very early on, we experienced such pleasure in touring or going to festivals, and we found many other people in our situation. That was a springboard to numerous opportunities. If you can get support from your local government, your city, or your community—that’s all welcome of course—but don’t count on that. Count on the specificity of what you do, its unique colour and taste, and remember that your audience could be somewhere else, and that’s more than OK.