Lepage’s troubles cross the Atlantic
Quebec director faces culture appropriation accusations in Paris
• Accusations of cultural appropriation aimed at Quebec theatre director Robert Lepage have gone international, with a show he’s directing in France later this year singled out for lack of Indigenous representation.
About 30 people signed an open letter published by Montreal newspaper Le Devoir on Saturday calling out Lepage and his French collaborators for not including Indigenous performers in an upcoming play called Kanata that will be performed in Paris in December.
The show, which claims to explore Canada’s history “through the lens of the relationship between white and aboriginal people,” is being staged by French theatre company Le Théâtre du Soleil, with Lepage as guest director.
This latest round of public recrimination comes shortly after the Montreal Jazz Festival cancelled a multi-night run of the Lepage-led play SLAV amid protests by activists who claimed that it amounted to cultural appropriation because it featured a white woman and largely white cast singing songs composed by black slaves.
Métis actor and theatre director Dave Jenniss, who signed the letter about Kanata, said it was too bad the show’s producers decided to consult Indigenous people when creating the show, but not to include them in the final performance.
“Once again, they take our stories, they question aboriginals and then push them aside completely,” he said in a phone interview.
Jenniss said the goal of the letter isn’t to censor anyone, but rather to invite the show’s creators to reflect on why Indigenous artists are not included in Kanata.
“Next time, I think there needs to be a stronger association with Indigenous people,” he said.
The letter was signed by 18 Indigenous artists and activists as well as nine non-Indigenous “allies,” including lawyers, artists and academics. They were responding to comments by Théâtre du Soleil director Ariane Mnouchkine, published in Le Devoir last week, where she said the performance would not include North American actors and defended using actors who have different backgrounds than the characters they portray. A representative for Lepage’s production company said he wasn’t immediately available to comment. Lepage remained silent throughout much of the preceding controversy around SLAV.
On July 6, however, he released a statement through his production company Ex Machina, calling the events leading to SLAV’s cancellation “a direct blow to artistic freedom.” “I prefer to let the detractors and defenders of the project debate and define what cultural appropriation means, for it is an extremely complicated problem and I don’t pretend to know how to solve it,” Lepage wrote. “Since the dawn of time, theatre has been based on a very simple principle, that of playing someone else,” he wrote. “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.”
I THINK THERE NEEDS TO BE A STRONGER ASSOCIATION WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE.