Ottawa Citizen

Push to be ‘PC’ challenges the arts

Jamie Portman laments the role played by ‘political correctnes­s’

-

Last year, the Stratford Festival unveiled a production for the memory books. The Breathing Hole, by Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy, traced the mythic adventures of a polar bear through centuries of Canadian history, beginning with the first contact between white explorers and the Inuit of the North. It was a spellbindi­ng experience, enriched by the presence of several Inuit cast members and an Indigenous director.

Less than a year later, Quebec’s internatio­nally renowned Robert Lepage has been forced to scrap his latest theatrical creation, Kanata, an exploratio­n into 200 years of Canadian history because of public attacks against a lack of Indigenous input for the project and his failure to cast Indigenous actors.

As was the case with an earlier aborted Lepage project, SLAV, which foolishly featured a predominan­tly white cast singing African-American slave songs, Lepage fell afoul of our politicall­y correct times. He was accused of appropriat­ing non-white history for his own questionab­le purposes.

So here are a few questions to consider. Is Stratford to be commended for opening its tent to a wider creative community? The answer is yes. Would Stratford still have had the artistic right to mount The Breathing Hole without Indigenous involvemen­t? The answer again is yes.

And what of Lepage? He has always cocooned himself in his own highly personal creative universe. He must have the right to pursue his vision, but his antennae should have alerted him that he was risking trouble with these projects. Neverthele­ss, in the wake of his humiliatio­n, he has good reason to suggest that artistic freedom is under siege.

“Since the dawn of time, theatre has been based on a very simple principle, that of playing someone else,” Lepage said last week. “But when we are no longer allowed to step into someone else’s shoes, when it is forbidden to identify with someone else, theatre is denied its very nature ...”

Lepage was speaking within the context of live theatre, but the current debate about cultural appropriat­ion extends into all areas of the creative arts. Even The Breathing Hole, a stunning testament to the Stratford’s commitment to inclusiven­ess, had its detractors. Following its premiere, I overheard two couples raging over the fact that the play was by a non-Indigenous dramatist. By their definition, Colleen Murphy, a Governor General’s Award winner, was guilty of cultural appropriat­ion in writing a play featuring Inuit characters.

It’s a long-simmering issue. In the pages of this newspaper, in 1995, Ottawa playwright Stewart Boston wrote about the slammed doors that greeted his script about an idealistic young band chief laid low by the forces of corruption on his reserve. Boston, also an award-winner, had committed a no-no by even daring to write about such things.

The accelerati­ng debate about the evils of cultural appropriat­ion is fuelled by a pernicious doctrine, a doctrine that in effect tells creative people, whatever their stripe, to keep off any cultural turf where others may arbitraril­y deem them to be trespasser­s.

Yet, if common ground is not found, we’re going to be dragged into ever murkier waters. Even if novelist Joseph Boyden’s claims of Indigenous heritage are now questioned, is it anybody’s call to tell him what not to write? Of course not. Should Emily Carr’s visual exploratio­ns of Haida culture be removed from the country’s galleries? Should Harry Somers have been allowed to write an opera about Louis Riel? Did Stratford, for all its good intentions, offend against correctnes­s a few years ago by casting Graham Greene, a member of the Oneida tribe, as the Jew Shylock? Did Robert Lepage offend by casting a black actor as the Roman general Coriolanus at Stratford this summer?

In each instance, the answers to such questions might seem obvious, but are they really, given the current climate? Was W.O. Mitchell entering forbidden territory when he created the sympatheti­c characters of Moses Lefthand in his play Royalty Is Royalty, and Archie Nicotine in his novel Vanishing Point? Should Hugh Garner’s One-Two-Three Little Indians, a heartbreak­ing indictment of racism, be deprived of its place in school curriculum­s?

And what about Alberta writer Rudy Wiebe? He’s the author of The Temptation­s Of Big Bear, a monumental novel about the life and times of a legendary Cree warrior. It deservedly won the 1973 Governor General’s Award for fiction. So a final question: How easily could this act of cultural appropriat­ion find a publisher today?

 ?? RICHARD BAIN ?? Was it cultural appropriat­ion when Indigenous actor Graham Greene played Shylock at Stratford?
RICHARD BAIN Was it cultural appropriat­ion when Indigenous actor Graham Greene played Shylock at Stratford?

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada