Lepage’s Kanata opens in Paris as a rehearsal
Controversial production is confusing, but also spurs discussions we need to have
I was warming my hands by a wood stove in the waiting room when a member of the Théâtre du Soleil collective popped by to say the première of Robert Lepage’s Kanata had just been declared a rehearsal. Ticket holders were invited to get their money back and watch the Saturday afternoon performance for free. Four years in the making, workshops in New York, Vancouver, Quebec City, and still not ready? Some things never change, including Lepage’s down-to-the-wire method. Having worked with him twice and seen many premières, I’m convinced the man knows no other way. Notwithstanding the panic signal, Soleil’s 79-year-old founder Ariane Mnouchkine remained her unflappable self, smiling warmly as she stood outside the cavernous theatre to shake hands with all 500 theatregoers who had found their way to the Bois de Vincennes on a bitterly cold day, despite a shutdown of main métro lines by the presence of yellow-vest protesters in the streets of central Paris. With a cast of 33, and at 2 1/2 hours with no intermission, Kanata — Épisode I: La Controverse is an emotionally wrenching piece of theatre.
The production is horrifying on the level of Greek tragedy and at moments hard to watch. It’s also exquisitely beautiful, comical, lyrical, and brimming with empathy for the human misery it shoves in your face. Most assuredly, it’s preview-level work, and will remain unchanged through the end of the Paris run on Feb. 17. Maybe forever, unless Lepage finds the time and resources to continue, which surely this work deserves. When it was over, my immediate reaction was to join the standing ovation. Not because it is the final word on a subject that will leave any Canadian sick with shame, nor because it is a clear, coherent theatrical work. Nada. Kanata — Épisode I has miles to go before it soars. It’s confused and confusing, sometimes embarrassing. But it’s also a brave lunge at several important discussions that, as citizens and artists, we need to have. Kanata’s public life began with a firestorm set last summer by an open letter in Le Devoir, signed by Indigenous artists, criticizing the absence of First Nations artists in a work focusing on their story. A five-hour meeting was held between Mnouchkine and Lepage and signatories in Montreal. Important partners withdrew. Plans for an international tour were cancelled. Then Mnouchkine and Lepage announced Kanata would go ahead in Paris, as part of the Festival d’automne, despite an extremely reduced budget (Lepage working for free) and only 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsal. The result, Épisode I, carries the debate onstage, telling the story of artists drawn into the maelstrom of real-life events, grappling with how to respond in their work. The opening scenes unfold like a dream. Flanked by a forest of perfectly cylindrical pillars, a man and a woman — museum curators — discuss the merits of 19th-century paintings of Indigenous people by European artists, then disappear into fog. Enter a drifting canoe paddled by a First Nations filmmaker capturing wilderness sounds on tape. A black bear ambles across the stage, two Mounties pass in ceremonial red jackets, the idyll broken suddenly by roaring chainsaws as a swarm of loggers reduce the woods to bare stage. A totem pole is wrecked. Mounties drag an Indigenous woman off screaming, and hand her baby to a priest. Flash forward to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, 2000, where a young French couple, a painter and an actor, rent a loft from an Asian woman who owns the building. Their names plucked from Shakespeare’s Tempest, Miranda and Ferdinand are the archetypal gushing lovers in a strange new land. There the dream ends, and a documentary nightmare begins, dissecting the daily tragedy of Canada’s Indigenous peoples at the dismal end of a wide spectrum: missing women found murdered, junkies desperate for the next fix, social workers and police burdened with inadequate resources, paralyzed by power wrangles. We’re taken to Robert Pickton’s pig farm, made to watch as he snaps handcuffs on a young Indigenous woman, drags her into his caravan, splashes her blood on the window. We follow the actor playing Pickton via film into a jail cell, where an actor posing as a fellow killer goads him into confession. Meanwhile, the French characters struggle with painter’s block, actor’s woes. These parallel stories grate, amuse, appal and intersect, sometimes with jarring effect. Ultimately, bleak reality overwhelms the artists’ journey. Ferdinand fails to find his place in “Hollywood North.” The couple argue and break up, leaving Miranda to paint portraits of the women Pickton killed — artwork that their grieving mothers can’t accept. The ending is Miranda’s artistic breakthrough: a wild abstract painting binge on the fourth wall, while in her dreams the dead and the grief-stricken are happily reunited. In life, there is no meeting of minds and hearts. Art on trial pleads guilty. I had expected Lepage would revisit the story of English actor Edmund Kean’s 1826 encounter with the Huron-Wyandots of Lorette. We co-wrote a play on that theme, called Alanienouidet, which he directed at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre in 1992. (I’d learned of the historical incident from a column by Edgar Andrew Collard in the Montreal Gazette.) Wyandot actor and director Yves Sioui Durand worked as research consultant and performed the role of Yellow Wolf. Other Indigenous roles were played by non-Indigenous actors … speaking Mohawk. I returned to the material for my play Venus of Dublin (presented at Centaur Theatre in 2000), focusing on Kean’s memory of the event, and the importance of the identity bestowed by his being welcomed into the Wyandot tribe. When I spoke with Lepage backstage after Saturday’s performance, he said the Kean story was to have featured in other episodes of Kanata. Originally, the Vancouver material was Part 3, but he lacked the budget for rehearsals and period costumes. Reaction to this scaled-down work will determine whether the trilogy has a future. As for the absence of Indigenous involvement, that debate also continues. Two signatories to the letter in Le Devoir were on hand for the first performance: Abenaki filmmaker Kim O’Bomsawin and Inuit writer Maya Cousineau Mollen, brought over by the association Décoloniser les arts. “It’s not a question of the actors — the cast could remain the same,” O’Bomsawin said. “But having an (Indigenous) co-writer or co-director could have avoided the feeling of inauthenticity. A vision from the inside would have allowed the team to go deeper, avoid stereotypes.” Cousineau Mollen agreed. “Unfortunately, Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Lepage missed a great opportunity to work with us. That’s what I find sad.” Ah, but with Lepage, to date, there are no fatal mistakes — only first drafts.