Lepage’s Kanata misses the mark
And the controversy continues.
The Robert Lepage play once known simply as Kanata was officially unveiled on the weekend at Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil under its new title: Kanata — Épisode 1 — La Controverse.
The addendumhas a double meaning: it refers to a controversy depicted within the story itself, as well as the heated debate that has followed the production since this summer.
In July, a group of Indigenous Canadians published an open letter in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, criticizing Lepage and his partners for creating a production about First Nations issues without any Indigenous representation in the cast and little consultation beforehand.
With cries of cultural appropriation on one side and artistic freedom of expression on the other, tensions rose to the point of the production’s American funders pulling their support and forcing Kanata’s cancellation. But in early September, Théâtre du Soleil and its storied founder, Ariane Mnouchkine, announced the play was back on. Lepage, Canada’s foremost export of the stage and the first outside director in the company’s 54-year history, would forgo his fee and would no longer comment on the work, letting it speak for itself.
After viewing it in its final preview, presented as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, its message comes through quite clearly: Lepage remains convinced that artists can heal deep social and economic inequality by building empathy for the “other,” an honourable intention, but relies on surface-level stories to do so.
Such stories might be well-suited to a European audience but wouldn’t work in a Canadian context: Canadian theatrical representations now require a deeper, more nuanced look at the Canadian Indigenous experience.
The Indigenous community argued that their presence in the creation process would have resulted in better art and this critic can’t help but feel they were right.
As in many of Lepage’s works, which are created in collaboration with his cast (in this case, Théâtre du Soleil’s multicultural ensemble, representing over two dozen countries and languages, yet notably missing Canadian Indigenous actors), the narrative revolves around an outsider engaging with a foreign culture.
This theme of intercultural dialogue is central to both Lepage’s and Mnouchkine’s careers — the Festival d’Automne website calls them “humanists, above all” — with both criticized for “cultural appropriation” as well as fiercely defended.
In Kanata, there’s another twist on this motif of outsider and other. For palpable reasons, Lepage is particularly obsessed with cultural encounters between First Nations and artists. The play begins at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, as conservator Leyla (Shaghayegh Beheshti) gives a tour to curator Jacques (Vincent Mangado), showing off some early depictions of First Nations people in fine art — in fact, a painting of an Indigenous man greets the audience as they file into Théâtre du Soleil’s historical venue, La Cartoucherie, a former artillery factory on the east side of Paris.
This opening feels like a wink from Lepage: See? This has been happening for centuries without consideration of the highly problematic colonial gaze such paintings inherently portray, nevertheless detailing the genocide happening, or about to happen, outside of the frame.
A following scene ends with the destruction of a totem pole and a confrontation between two Mounties and a priest stealing a baby from a crying woman (Nirupama Nityanandan), a scene that heavily recalls Cree painter Kent Monkman’s devastating portrayal of residential schools, The Scream.
From Ottawa we move to East Vancouver, where French couple Miranda (Dominique Jambert), a painter, and Ferdinand (Sébastien Brottet-Michel), an actor, are renting an expensive loft from a Chinese landlord (Man Waï Fok).
Their new home near Hastings St., where pop-up pharmacies and safeinjection sites serve the street population, changes both of their practices. Ferdinand struggles to lose his French accent, which is keeping him from landing a gig, while Miranda finds new inspiration by befriending Tanya (Fré- dérique Voruz), a young Indigenous woman and heroin addict, with feathers accenting her long black hair.
This brings up the other controversy ripped from the headlines in Kanata. Inspired by a real event in Vancouver, Miranda paints portraits of Vancouver’s missing and murdered Indigenous women after Tanya gruesomely dies. But her exhibition is cancelled when the public complains that she has not received permission from the women’s families.
Miranda’s dismay leads her to Hastings St., looking to gain some lived experience that would, apparently, give her work credibility. Indigenous documentarian Tobie (Martial Jacques) instead invites her to participate in a traditional pipe ceremony in his canoe. Suspended in the air and tilting to give the audience a view, this is where Lepage’s skill in creating moving, memorable images is most effectively seen in a production largely void of Lepage’s typical visual razzle dazzle.
And it leads to a reckoning: Miranda doesn’t get the exhibition she desired, but she turns the walls of her loft into her own personal dedication to her subjects.
As characters past and present, alive and dead, enter her apartment, we see the artist’s power to resurrect stories and people, reunite loved ones and find peace.
The mostly French audience at the preview was moved by Lepage’s portrayal of the plight of Canadian Indigenous people, caught in drug addictions, family abuse and preyed upon by Robert Pickton (Maurice Durozier).
That’s another plot line ripped from the headlines and, to play into the woke millennial stereotype, I’d ask for a trigger warning.
Transitioning from the British Columbia police department to a dingy pig farm — with a sour red-haired man cleaning red splatter from his trailer, as actors play his animals, emitting squeals that were a mix of human and animal — was nauseating, in a deeply upsetting way.
Following Pickton from crime to capture does get an emotional reaction, but it does so by leaning into sensationalism.
After that, Lepage swings hard into the argument over artistic expression and Miranda’s story takes over. It’s unlikely that Lepage means to erase the advocacy work of Indigenous people, but it nevertheless strays into that territory.
Through Miranda, Lepage, well-intentioned as he is, places the outsider in the saviour position. The call to action in Kanata is simply to keep making art, no matter who protests. In terms of change, the kind that will save lives from the likes of Pickton, influence a police force that ignores Indigenous missing women, or challenge long-held colonial attitudes, it feels rather toothless, old-fashioned and one-dimensional.
It’s unfortunate that, for a Canadian viewing it in France, Kanata feels like an old-fashioned, simplistic view of Canadian Indigenous inequality and the steps needed to address it.
The question that remains after viewing Lepage’s aim to spread empathy and understanding is simple: When is empathy useful and when does action need to take over?