Robert Lepage Cancels Second Controversial Production

Earlier this month, the Canadian director’s piece SLĀV, which featured African-American slave songs performed by white singers, was cut from the Montreal Jazz Festival after protests. Now Lepage has called off Kanata, a show about the relationship between European settlers in Canada and First Nations peoples which he created for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Indigenous Canadian artists had objected to work about them being made without their participation, and the controversy led several North American co-producers to back out of the project.