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Lepage accepts fairy-tale honour in Denmark

ODENSE, Denmark - Multi-discipline Canadian artist Robert Lepage graciously accepted the 2004 Hans Christian Andersen Prize Friday in Odense, the Danish hometown of the famed fairy tale writer.

"Even before the cinema, he had a very cinematic way of telling stories," Lepage said of Andersen who, although known worldwide for fairy tales like The Emperor's New Clothes and The Little Mermaid, was also a novelist, poet and playwright.

The Quebec City-born Lepage was recognized for creating a one-man show based on Andersen's The Dryad, which details the effect of technology on the writer's fairy-tale universe. Lepage's work will debut next year in Quebec before travelling to performances in Copenhagen and London.

Award organizers presented the filmmaker and theatre creator with a small bronze bust of Andersen and a cash prize of 50,000 euro (approximately $80,000 Cdn).

He joined this year's honorary award-winners: Denmark's Queen Margrethe II, credited for illustrating dozens of Andersen's fairy tales since 1984; Brazillian scholar Ana Maria da Costa S. Menin, for her doctoral dissertation The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen: The Brazilianization of a Tale for Children; and Bruno Berni, who translated all of Andersen's fairy tales and some of his novels into Italian.

According to Lepage, Canadians can discover a lot in the Danish writer's body of work.

"Our culture is still at its childhood," he said.

"In Canada, we have a very, very young culture and a lot of the themes that Andersen touches are [...] exactly the things that concerns us today in Canada: the exile of the people from the countryside into the cities, self-quest of identity, the fact that a lot of Canadians -- to find their identity -- have to travel abroad today."

Danish officials are currently preparing for Andersen's bicentennial in 2005, planning an eight-month-long celebration that features a wide range of cultural performances -- from film and TV to theatre and dance to multimedia and educational exhibits -- both in Denmark and abroad.

Posted by thinkum at April 3, 2004 10:36 AM