The epic structure of The Seven Streams of the River Ota, comprising seven acts, spanning eight hours, engaging ten actors and actresses in over thirty roles, is matched by an epic thematic. A meeting between a U.S. military photographer surveying the devastation of the first atomic bomb and a woman disfigured by the blast, a hibakusha, initiates a cross-generational series of events that will stretch over the next fifty years and venture across three continents. With scenes set in Hiroshima, a Nazi concentration camp, and a hotel room where one character with AIDS calmly submits to a doctor-assisted suicide, death and destruction figure prominently. At the same time, however, glimmers of rebirth, survival and humour emerge in these and other scenes to render the emotional tenor of the performance difficult to summarize.
Equally epic was the process of creation. The Seven Streams developed over a three-year period by Lepage and his collective Ex Machina, who collaborated on the writing and prolonged evolution of the piece. Stylistically, Lepage incorporated a promethean diversity of staging techniques and theatrical traditions, from bunraku puppetry and kabuki to farce and opera, along with striking effects with film, video, mirrors, screens and shadows. The internationalism of the narrative is reflected in the half-dozen languages spoken in the piece, and reaches a crescendo of literality with the inclusion of an interpreter, complete with headphones and booth, simultaneously translating the characters' dialogue.
Based as it is on the events of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, The Seven Streams cannot help being considered in the context of "anniversary culture." By resisting any overt appeal to commemoration or education, the poetry of the work seems to place it outside of the domain in which the debates on the politics of memory are normally situated. If the goal of many of the recently inaugurated monuments and museums is to make the events of the 1940s resonant to those for whom these events may only exist as distant, historical abstractions, then Lepage achieves a certain measure of success where the efficacy of photographs (however horrific), artifacts (no matter how many or how authentic) and reconstructions (despite their accuracy) remain problematic. Lepage's work operates on a different register than can be engaged solely via the issues of representation or meaning; it is one which implicates diverse layers of experience on the much more emotional and sensorial level of affect.
In some ways Lepage takes up the challenge of what to do after the deconstructive strategies of the avant-garde -- shock, disruption, estrangement, reflexivity -- have been banalized and assimilated into mass cultural style. Viewing The Seven Streams in New York, it is instructive (and perhaps inevitable) to compare it to some of the city's prominent theatrical agitators and innovators. Lepage, for instance, is able to match the visual power of Robert Wilson, the visceral intensity of The Wooster Group and the sudden shifts and dissonances of Richard Foreman, and montage these disparate strategies into a fluid and poignant experience. Yet there is also a striking difference. As Art in Bulk's staging has the tendency now to degenerate into a series of galaxy paintings for sale, the energy of The Wooster Group to verge on a kind of chic sadism and Foreman's paranoid world to collapse upon itself, Lepage's perspective is more generative than critical, recuperating the power of emotional insight, wisdom, and, at the risk of sounding hopelessly uncritical, compassion for the human condition.
While emotion, one could argue, was always present in the avantgarde (of what value was estrangement and perceptual disorientation if it only was experienced intellectually?), Lepage's theatre of the senses evokes it in such a way that one might qualify it oxymoronically as a "radical absorption." That is, the work absorbs its spectators in a compelling emotional experience and, at the same time, comments upon and decenters its power to do so from inside the experience itself. Although Lepage is not the only thaumaturge elevating pathopoeia (the Greek term for creating or soliciting emotion) from a minor rhetorical strategy to a central dramatic experience, his work is a particularly moving call for the reconsideration of emotionality. Absorption may appear to be the opposite of politicized dissonance, to be an audience position of passivity and suggestibility rather than one of agency and volition. The Seven Streams is, by turns, too slow, too novel, too surreal to be mindlessly digested. Under Lepage's direction absorption does not equate with "hypnosis"; it assumes complex, even critical dimensions.
If "compassion" and "emotionality" are difficult words to write, let alone attempt to theorize as challenging vehicles of aesthetic engagement, it is due to their disreputable association with Victorian sentimentality, escapist popular culture and techniques of manipulation, not to mention occupying the inferior binary position to "will" and "rationality." Critics have rightfully assailed the ideological assumptions underpinning some blunt appeals to the emotions, especially in the realm of politics and advertising, yet at what point do these analyses foreclose the positivity of emotion altogether? Admittedly, Lepage's work plays across a range of charged issues, of which emotionality is but one. Yet it is in regard to the politics of the emotions that he inspires a subtle and radical discussion.
