Theatre Visionary to Visit MIT

MIT’s McDermott Award taps exceptionally creative people who are rising in their fields. A recent pick was the exuberant Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel. This year, it is Canadian theater visionary Robert Lepage, a director, playwright, actor, and film director.

Renowned for work in theater and film, Lepage also has created two Cirque du Soleil productions and The Image Mill™, a spectacular architectural illumination and urban projection. He and his creative team Ex Machina have made dazzlingly original contributions to theater, opera, film, stagecraft, circus performance, and public art. In his most recent work, Lepage transformed Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen with an adventurous and technically sophisticated set in a groundbreaking production for the Metropolitan Opera in New York—the most ambitious the Met has ever attempted.

Distinctive features of the honor include a campus residency, set for April 24-26, and a $75,000 cash prize. Lepage will receive the 2012 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT during a public event that will include a discussion of his work with Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The complete Wagner four-opera cycle will be presented in April and May 2012 at the Metropolitan Opera, coinciding with Lepage’s residency at MIT.

Here’s how Lepage sees his work:

“The survival of the art of theatre depends on its capacity to reinvent itself by embracing new tools and new languages. In a way, innovators in both arts and sciences walk on parallel paths: they have to keep their minds constantly open to new possibilities as their imagination is the best instrument to expand the limits of their fields. I am thus deeply honored to be recognized by MIT, an institution committed to facing the challenges of our era and imagining a better future.”