Indigenous voices absent from play
Consultants back away from Lepage’s Kanata
MONTREAL• Robert Lepage’s latest theatre project, a re-telling of Canada’s history through “the prism of relations between whites and natives,” has sparked criticism because there are no Indigenous actors in the cast.
In defending the play Kanata, the Quebec director and the director of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil, where it is scheduled to première in December, have invoked their extensive consultations with Indigenous artists during its creation. But now even some of those consulted are distancing themselves.
“I gave Robert Lapage (sic) tons of advice, he obviously took none of it,” Blackfoot filmmaker Cowboy Smithx (pronounced Smith) wrote on Twitter Monday. “I don’t appreciate being name-dropped.” He added that Lepage “seems set in his ways” and Smithx has “lost interest in his work.”
The Kanata controversy follows protests and the cancellation of Montreal performances of Lepage’s SLAV, in which a predominantly white cast sings slave songs and, in one scene, mimes picking cotton.
Kanata — which the play’s description notes is the Iroquoian word for village that gave its name to Canada — is billed as a “story of epic proportions” retracing 200 years of Canadian history.
Lepage focused on three symbolic episodes to explore relations between Indigenous Canadians and the white population. The first is the story of 19th-century Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, an Englishman who was welcomed into a Huron community outside Quebec City. The second is the saga of residential schools, and the third is the disappearance and murder of Indigenous women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“As humanists, above all, (Lepage and Théâtre du Soleil director Ariane Mnouchkine) share in the conviction that the artist has a duty to bear witness to the times he or she lives in,” reads a description of Kanata from the Paris festival helping stage it.
Guy Sioui Durand, a Huron sociologist and visual art expert whom Lepage consulted about Kanata, said he has worked with Lepage in the past and he cannot explain the “brain cramp” that would lead to his exclusion of Indigenous actors on the heels of the SLAV debacle.
“I don’t understand how they did not think of this. How is it that a troupe of French actors are going to portray Indigenous Americans? We’re not in the age of blackface. They need to explain,” Sioui Durand said.
He was consulted about specific content in the play, “but that doesn’t mean I support the process,” he said.
Sandra Laronde was director of Indigenous arts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity when Lepage came to workshop the play that would become Kanata in 2016. At the time its working title was The Kean Project.
She said she always found Lepage respectful and cordial, and she praised him as “a fabulous director.” But like Smithx, she feels her consultation role is being invoked to provide cover for a seriously flawed production.
“What I’m interested in is the bigger picture of who gets to tell these kind of stories in Canada,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I think it’s a really important time in Canada to get it right, because we’ve had so many years of our stories being told through a certain kind of lens that is not particularly our own.”
She said a workshop or two with Indigenous participants — or the addition of an Indigenous actor — is not enough to correct the distorted lens.
“It has to be more than just an actor in it,” she said. “It’s really getting into the deeper creative space that I’m talking about — whether we’re producing, whether we’re directing, whether we’re writing — moving beyond consultation.”
On the weekend, about 30 people signed an open letter published in Montreal’s Le Devoir accusing Lepage and Mnouchkine of rendering Indigenous people invisible.
“The Indigenous movement has shown in recent years that it is a mistake to erase us from the public space,” the letter said. “We are not invisible and we will not be quiet.”
In response to the letter, Lepage and Mnouchkine have invited the signatories to meet with them Thursday. Lepage has said he would not comment before the meeting.
WHAT I’M INTERESTED IN IS … WHO GETS TO TELL THESE KIND OF STORIES INCANADA.