duMaurier World Stage launched its seventh bi-annual, international festival this week with a press conference featuring Quebec's Robert Lepage, whose newest work, Geometry of Miracles, opens the festival on April 16, 1998.

A world premiere, Lepage's play chronicles the life of architectural visionary Frank Lloyd Wright, during the period between 1934 and 1948. It also examines Wright's friendship with Serbo-Croat spiritual guru Gurdjieff.

Lepage reported that Miracles will use "more creative elements from other disciplines, such as music and dance, although it is not a dance piece." He calls it as ambitious as his last work, Seven Streams of the River Ota in theme and content, though not in length.

Lepage says the show is about the idea of community and parallels his own questions of how an individual can remain be strong within a collective way of working.

Miracles has a creative team of seven, with opera singer Rebecca Blankenship serving as dramaturge and Lepage as director. The production will feature a cast of ten. The 18-day duMaurier World Stage has become an international event of note, but Artistic Director Don Shipley emphasized at the conference that there are many new relationships being forged with local Toronto theatres. He also said there will be new programs running in conjunction with the productions and a variety of indigenous work to balance the international offerings.

A full announcement of productions will be made in February.

For further information call: 416-973-4600.

By Mira Friedlander
Canadian Correspondent