The Lepage Affairs

Representation and presence in the scenario of the SLĀV and Kanata controversy

Abstract

The controversy that erupted following the accusation of cultural appropriation triggered between 2018 and 2019 by Robert Lepage’s plays SLĀV and Kanata is analysed in the Canadian context and in the political and cultural specificity of Quebec. Favouring the lens of Performances Studies, the polemic, as a symptom of a social malaise, is studied as a performance and reveals a scenario of embodied imaginaries within which to observe a crisis of the worldview built on the power relationship between a majority identity and minority otherness. The conflict between representation and presence within the living arts reveals the erosion of the mimetic paradigm of representation: it is the immanent body on the stage of the actor belonging to a historically oppressed minority that demands an ethics of representation