Friday, November 21, 2008

'The Blue Dragon' at UCLA Live

A room snowing with static. A cyclist furiously pedaling forward but heading backward. Chinese characters that bleed into being on a screen. These are pieces in Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s theatrical puzzle “The Blue Dragon,” now playing at the Freud as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival.

This work-in-progress, co-commissioned by the festival, marks the celebrated Québécois hyphenate’s first appearance on stage in Los Angeles. But “Dragon” is a return of sorts, as Lepage plays a character first seen in his 1985 epic “The Dragons’ Trilogy.” That piece ended with Pierre Lamontagne going off to China to study; this “Dragon” finds him running an art collective in Shanghai and fighting a serious case of the mean reds.

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