François Séguin’s stage designs range from Cirque du Soleil spectacles to stage adaptations of Kafka to contemporary oratorio. He has been the production designer on award winning films such as The Barbarian Invasions and The Red Violin. At the New Zealand International Arts Festival for the double bill staging of Bertold Brecht’s The Lindberg Flight / The Flight Over the Ocean and The Seven Deadly Sins, directed by François Girard, Séguin talks with CATHERINE BISLEY.


CB: It must be a big task getting a show of this size all the way to New Zealand.

FS: Oh for me it was easy. They just told me where to go [laughs]. I came here. It looks big but it is not so big. And the people who put it together are muscly. There’s no panic, no heart attack.

CB: The Lindberg Flight was originally intended for radio, wasn’t it?

FS: Yes.

CB: Did it this affect your approach to designing the set?

FS: Well the director [Girard] is a friend of mine. He listened to that piece a long time ago and he was always interested in doing it. And Lyon [Opera] asked him to propose something and he did. They were not sure about it because it was a radio thing. But he had a concept… not visually resolved but, you know he wanted to play it as a radio oratorio. When Lyon accepted the double bill we sat down and went through different phrases. You know, how to abstract this, how not be too literal…

CB: This is a longstanding collaboration with Francois Girard. It must be quite easy working together?

FS: It’s easy. Yes yes yes.

CB: Is it quite an intuitive relationship?

FS: As a designer you always have to try and find a language, basically a director’s language that you can see on stage. I know his language now after all those years. So for us it’s back and forth – it’s easy. I don’t doubt him he doesn’t doubt me. Sometimes we go in one direction in a common accord. Sometimes we have to go back to stage one, phase one… It’s never a big drama. No drama.

CB: Francois Girard has done lots of musically based projects. Have you designed for opera before?

FS: We did a piece in New York City an oratorio called The Lost Objective which was a contemporary piece by a collective called Bang on the Can. So that [the Brecht double bill] was my second adventure in opera.

CB: Brecht was a man of strong opinions. How do you find his philosophy of the stage?

FS: I went to theatre school in the seventies. And Brecht was the big thing: at school you read and you study and you perform Brecht almost every year. It’s all naivety about the communist era and politically it… the whole dream now, fifty years later, it’s over. Nobody wants to go there anymore, for all kind of reasons. But for him the dream was still very alive. Everyone knows what happened [with communism]. But I still relate to his principle of distanciation, and the acting method. He did amazing plays, basically.

CB: In the footage I’ve seen of the Berliner Ensemble productions the stage is always quite bare….

FS: Yeah. He was at the beginning of abstraction in the theatre. He was against naturalism. You have to remember he started in the 1930s where everything was like a big backdrop painting with even light effects. So he cleaned it up. For starters it’s all cabaret setting.

CB: Brecht was very interested in new technology, as you see with Lindberg flight. How did he use technology?

FS: I don’t think he used big machinery. He was just after Wagner. So Wagner was a big big, major thing, and he [Brecht] decided to use a wholly other language.

CB: So does your set design use alienation techniques? Exposed lights etc?

FS: As I said, it’s fifty years later. Those things have been done so many times that you have to re-approach them. Brecht is not naturalistic. You start with a bare stage. It’s kinda formal what we did. It’s very formal. It’s a 3D kinda sculpture. But there is no emotion in the set. None at all. It’s very bare and very stark.

CB: What is your own philosophy about set design?

FS: It is a function of telling a story. I design plays and I design movies… and you go with the best way to tell a story. As a set designer you go with the director’s vision. I wouldn’t mind doing a Busby Berkeley kinda set…. You know it the 30s, the sailors all that, but it's fine.


CB: Having worked on vast array of projects in both film and theatre, do you find the different mediums interconnect and influence each other in your designs?

FS: Some people would say that when I am designing a movie I’m theatrical [laughs] and when I am designing a set it's more cinematic. For me it’s been a mixture for so long, you know, I go on a project and have all these ideas behind me. It’s true, sometimes I make a very emotional set for a movie but when I do stage I’m more… trying not to be so emotional. So why? I don’t know.

CB: You have been working on a big project for Cirque du Soleil?

FS: Yes yes, again with the same director.

CB: So it’s a huge spectacle?

FS: Big big big big. Since I came to New Zealand I received a couple of photos of them putting the set together. It’s so big I don’t have to show up for a month because there is nothing for me to do. It’s going to take a month for them to get the basic elements together. It’s so huge.

CB: On the other hand you have also done a design for Kafka’s The Trial recently - quite the opposite of the Cirque du Soleil piece really?

FS: Yes. It’s not the same scale. It’s not the same… ah…. Money. There are not many companies that can afford the kind of stuff you can do with the Cirque du Soleil. It’s good and bad. It’s amazing that despite the fact we have a wealthy… healthy or wealthy budget [laughs]. You still have the same drama of cutting “it’s too big” “we don’t have money for this”. It’s the same but a big, big scale.

CB: Turning back to the current show. What do you see as the triumph of your set design?

FS: It’s two maps, it’s the world. It’s America meeting Europe in the first and then the other one is just the USA. I like this kinda metaphor of the building rising behind the map while Anna is working basically and sending money to the family. At one point I was trying to incorporate the Exxon building in Texas [laughs]… the shape – I couldn’t figure it out… and then we decided, no, it’s too literal.

CB: Do you have a metaphor that describes your process of designing a set? For example, I once heard scriptwriting described as making a cut and controlling the bleeding…

FS: Woah [laughs].

CB: Yeah, pretty full on.

FS: I guess… I’m not sure this is actually answering the question. I guess I would have loved to have been a storyteller but I’m not good with words. But by projection I go to people who tell stories and I want to be part of telling the story. You know, I bleed sometimes [laughs]. But even if I take the whole process very personally, it’s still not me. It’s still somebody else I’m just in the back. I don’t have the fame but at the same time I don’t have the wound that goes with it.

CB: Where do you see as the future of the stage? What’s changing?

FS: Just in my own lifetime, the cost of putting a show together…. so like 30 years ago you can do a show for very little money. And I think the kids are still doing it but it’s kinda growing up. It’s good and sad at the same time, but I can’t go back there - building my own set along with a hammer and a friend. But I did it, I’m happy I did it and I learnt a lot doing it. With theatre I think everything is possible - from two guys on a corner of the street to Miss Butterfly and Cirque du Soleil. I think historically too there has always been from the small to the big. The Roman the Greeks, the... It’s not the same energy to see a little show in a fifty seat place and to see a spectacle in an arena. But it’s still people coming together to witness and enjoy.

CB: The Lindberg Flight / Seven Deadly Sins would appear to have both these elements. The spectacle element is matched with a whole lot of meaning…

FS: Yeah yeah yeah. It’s challenging music in a way, even though it is very modern. It is hummable, you can sing. But it’s not pop music. It will challenge you but it is beautiful music.