Needles and Opium

At the same time, Miles Davis sets foot in Europe for the first time, bringing bebop to Paris. The jazz clubs are packed, the nights seem endless, yet what sounds like a new beginning already carries the shadow of a exhausted future. Forty years later, a man from Quebec sits alone in his room at the Hôtel La Louisiane in Paris. He is trying to forget a lost love. His spiritual torment mirrors Cocteau’s addiction to opium and Davis’s to heroin. The sketches of the »prince of poets« and the blue notes of the jazz musician accompany his leap into oblivion.

At FIND 2026, a new version of a modern classic, Robert Lepage’s »Needles and Opium«, is being presented in Germany for the first time, several decades after its world premiere. In his hypnotic production, originally created in 1991 and subsequently celebrated around the globe, Lepage explores the interplay of art, addiction, intoxication and unrequited love on both sides of the Atlantic, using virtuoso video techniques, music, acting and acrobatics.
ROBERT LEPAGE, born in Quebec in 1957, has been one of the world’s most important contemporary storytellers and theatre makers for more than three decades with his productions for theatre, opera, circus and film.

In 2022, FIND dedicated a focus to him and showed the legendary production »The Seven Streams of the River Ōta« and his highly acclaimed solo piece »887«. In 2024, his production »Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe« premiered at Schaubühne.


95 minutes