The Stage as Networked Battleground:
Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance

Theatre and censorship have long been intertwined. From early Greek theatre to twenty‑first‑century performance art, political, cultural, and social powers have repeatedly sought to suppress the performing arts. Their reasons have ranged from legal restrictions to moral objections, sexual indecency, ideological conflicts, and efforts to silence work that negatively portrays certain targeted groups or communities. Following a brief overview of the legal and political history of censorship in the Canadian and American contexts, this article explores theatrical censorship, its corresponding dissent and embattled freedoms, and the way various regimes of restraints affect performative frameworks. It also considers specific cases of censorship in Canadian theatre: the case of Denise Boucher’s The Fairies are Thirsty (1978), as well as the question of cultural appropriation and pretendianism in the work of acclaimed Québécois director Robert Lepage (SLĀV, 2018) and his collaboration with French powerhouse director Ariane Mnouchkine (Kanata, 2018). Lastly, we will turn to an analysis of censorship of Christopher Morris’ play The Runner at the PuSh Festival (Vancouver 2024) and the way it pitted communities against one another occasioned by the Israel-Gaza War. By doing so, I demonstrate how the functioning of censorship has shifted—especially in the Canadian context—from state or institutional sanctions to self-censorship and community grounded suppression.

In general, theatre tends to attract more threats to control it than other art forms, examples of which abound. One famous example is Emile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), the only work adapted to the stage by its author. Zola used this adaptation to launch a campaign against censorship in France under the Third Republic; the play was finally produced at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1888. Other examples of censored photographs, paintings, sculptures, rarely receive the level of attention performance does. In recent years, performance art has drawn more ire and suppression than other forms, such as Ai Weiwei’s performances Drowned Child (2016) and Sunflower Seeds (2010). Feminist performance artists experience similar suppression such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), which was censored while her other visual art and installations were not. The reasons why theatre and performance seem to attract more censorship range from the obvious institutional regulation of a live and living art form that has the potential to better mobilize audiences, to reasons of religious, moral, political taboos that perceive theatre expression as more subversive and less controllable than film or media. Theatre may have the power to change the world or instigate political and social unrest by promoting transgressive actions that mobilize audiences. 

In a way it is not censorship that conditions what is censorable: it is what is censored that often redefines censorship in theatre. Judith Butler has explained how censorship is a productive and formative power that produces that which it regulates. Butler writes:

Censorship is most often referred to as that which is directed against persons or against the content of their speech. If censorship, however, is a way of producing speech, constraining in advance what will and will not become acceptable speech, then it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of juridical power.(1)

Butler echoes Foucault here who considered censorship as a productive rather than a strictly regulatory mechanism. Foucault writes:

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network, which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.(2)

In different ways, forms of censorship and restrictions today are welcome and tolerated, such as what can be shown on television at certain times of the day, film, video game, and program rating. This is what marks the shift from state and regulatory censorship to community directives.

More recent theorizing of censorship widens the scope of definition to encompass any censorious activity that is “external, coercive and repressive,”(3) while other new assessments associate censorship with “any attempt to modify the integrity of the artistic work and its reception.”(4) The problem with wider definitions of censorship is that they do not account for more insidious forms of suppression such as self-censorship, pre-emptive censorship, or indirect censorship, prompted by community pressure, cancel culture, vandalism, digital and social media controls, press campaigns, doxing of artists, threats of prosecution or libel, etc. More recent definitions of censorship have to do with the yielding of power beyond a strictly legal framework. In this regard, Sue Curry Jansen’s position in her book Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge argues that recent censorship has shifted towards surveillance and control not only by the state, but also by actors in the market, which I unpack in more detail below.

New and various mechanisms of censorship have shifted from state-based to market- and community-driven articulations that widen the scope beyond religious, political or moral grounds. Other reasons for censorship include: artistic policies, cultural and community pressures, customs and border control of artistic products, policing and surveillance action, populist opposition in the media or public sphere, community boycott and cancel culture, denial of funding (such as by the Canada Council for the Arts, or provincial and municipal Arts Funding bodies), just to name a few examples. Similarly, serious constraints in recent years have produced vehement censorship that has taken the form of violent attacks on artists, destruction of artwork, protests and riots at venues, attacks on audiences and creative teams, threats of violence, threats of damage or boycott of host venues, demonstrations to shut down productions, and so forth. These threats have raised the stakes on the question of censorship with more violent and lethal assaults on artists and art and entertainment venues, concert halls, auditoriums, often inflicting mass casualties. Censorious attacks have reached alarming levels with incidents such as the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004); the plan to murder Danish cartoonist Kurt Westegaard (2008); the Charlie Hebdo massacre (2015); the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida (2016); the attack at the Moscow Dubrovka theatre (2002); the terror attack on the Bataclan Music Hall in France (2015); the Manchester Arena attack in the UK (2017); the recent massacre at the Nova Music Festival in Israel (2023); and the sordid list goes on. Unmistakably, censorship in the twenty-first century has shifted in methods, severity, forms, and magnitude ranging from regulatory dictates imposed by the state or its agents to forms of silencing by the community.

Theatre Censorship

Legal statutes pertaining to theatrical censorship fall for the most part under “community standards,”(5) pushing the regulatory debate into the public arena as not all censorship is decided on the basis of the law but more on its impact on the community. More recent definitions of censorship have thus widened the scope beyond the legal framework. Sue Curry Jansen argues that a modern understanding of censorship extends to forms of “surveillance: a mechanism for gathering intelligence that the powerful can use to tighten control over people or ideas that threaten to disrupt established systems of order.”(6) For Jansen, censorship has shifted from state or official sanctions to corporate, social, and non-governmental entities exercising indirect power and control. In the first part of her book, entitled “Parables of Persecution,” Jansen argues that, despite the Enlightenment effort to separate power and knowledge, they remain inextricably linked where one ensures the functioning of the other.(7) Surveillance of dissent is a socially structured albeit arbitrary form of silencing that enables different forms of censorship such as market censorship to dictate what is acceptable and what is to be spurned in the so-called “free market of ideas.” 

The digital age has also expanded officially sanctioned procedures, or censorship based on propriety or community offense. With the speed at which information and material is disseminated to global audiences, social media networks, instant transmission, or quick sharing, it becomes nearly impossible to censor offending material in time. By the time the censors get a hold of the material, it has already circulated widely. Community standards have morphed into “cancel culture” and networked society pressure. Cancel culture is generally understood as canceling support for an event, a public figure, a work, or an artist if the public considers the person or the work objectionable or offensive. Social media in recent years has exacerbated the impact of such “call outs” as the public appoints itself the arbiter of what is right, wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. This point was made clear recently by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders in The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship who explain “media exerts an influence that is just as powerful in shaping and amplifying a culture of censoriousness that not only rivals officially recognised methods of censorship but often supersedes them. This has resulted in conditions that have been termed ‘cancel culture.’”(8)

Overall, conventional and historical censorship was based on sanctioning by state or state agents, what the British commonly call “statutory censorship” (in addition to other institutional agents: the Church or religious authority, the military, the courts, etc.) tasked with ridding the stage of offensive and grievous material in the name of the state. However, late twentieth century and early twenty-first century regarded censorship as a response to ideological, social, or political grievances independent of the state and motivated for the large part by offences to the community or the commons. The most important example of this is the wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson at the Superbowl (2004).(9) As such, censorship may no longer be understood in its strictly legal framework. Today, the laws can rarely contemplate objections on moral grounds for works that express for example heresy, blasphemy, offense, or even libel. Moral ground, public morality, decency, propriety, and bienséance—the neo-classical rule of good taste—are the reasons why many plays were censored can hardly regulate harmfulness.

Theatre Censorship Cases in Canada

I. The Fairies are Thirsty [Les fées ont soif] 

Québécois poet and journalist Denise Boucher is well known for her controversial militant and feminist writing. After Québec’s Quiet Revolution, artists confronted the Church and state in more forceful ways, armed with newfound public discontent and inspired by the American Civil Rights movement.(10) Boucher’s 1978 play Les fées ont soif (The Fairies are Thirsty) showcases women’s issues and breaks down the stereotypical representation of women especially the archetype of the Virgin Mary, used by the Church to suppress female sexuality. 

The play’s title is borrowed from nineteenth century French historian, Jules Michelet, who described the origins of the fairies’ myth in the legend of Satanism and witchcraft in his essay La Sorcière (1862). In the legend, the fairies were originally a group of women in ancient Gaul who refused to stop dancing upon the arrival of Christ and his apostles. For this sacrilege, they were shrunk and doomed to live, in miniature form, in the woods until Judgement Day. Although no one was miniaturized in Boucher’s play, the story brings us three women: the quintessential mother and housewife, Marie; the prostitute, Madeleine dressed in kinky leather and feather boas; and the Virgin Mary, daringly playing herself. In a series of poetic monologues, Marie and Madeleine discuss their oppressed conditions, abuse, battery, and rape at the hands of husbands and clients emboldened by the Church’s hegemony and the state’s patriarchy, while the Virgin Mary attempts to escape from the religious archetypes that body-shame her and lock her in unattainable images of piety and modesty.

Well-known director Jean-Luc Bastien agreed to direct the controversial play. In June 1978, five months before its premiere, the Montreal Arts Council pulled the funding citing its “filthy, sacrilegious and blasphemous language.”(11) The artistic director of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Jean-Louis Roux, denounced censorship and promised that the play will go ahead. The entire city council was castigated in the media, while cultural, artistic, and labor organizations circulated petitions defending the work. Roux promised that the play would be staged on schedule whether arts funding was available or not. It opened on 10 November 1978 and ran for a month in front of full houses and garnered a lot of acclaim. Affronted, Montreal’s Catholic Archdiocese launched a campaign to denounce the show and encouraged congregations to picket the theatre while buying blocks of tickets to attend the performance and recite the rosary as disruption. Other groups threw medals of the Virgin Mary on the stage like confetti. The “crusade” against the play continued into January 1979, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Famously, Judge Gabrielle Vallée asked the group representing the Catholic militants: “who do you represent”? When they responded that they represent “Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin,” the magistrate immediately threw the case out. Further court cases to suppress the publication of the play were launched against the work until the Supreme Court of Canada, again, refused to hear them in 1980.(12) After its initial production, the play was rarely staged in Canada (or elsewhere). Nevertheless, it remains a significant event of how community responses to censorship can change the course of theatre history.

II. Kanata & SLĀV

While the theatre community’s response in the case of The Fairies are Thirsty mobilized to defend the production, aided by a secular Supreme Court adamant on protecting artistic freedom at a time when Canada (and Québec) was defining itself in terms of civil rights, the following examples in some ways are based on the opposite response. By “opposite response” I mean one in which the community, instead of rushing to the defense of the work, mobilized against it and against the artists and functioned as the impetus for censoring and cancelling the work. In the following, I turn to an analysis of two plays dealing with settler-colonial contact, Kanata, and slave songs, SLĀV, as well as a corresponding complex community response that generated debates around appropriation and representation more than obscenity. 

Cultural and artistic appropriation has been central to the production of aesthetic forms in Western theatre, including Canada. Examples abound of cultural theft and appropriation of Indigenous art forms and traditions and a continued lack of awareness for the dynamic of race, ethnicity, cultural identity and representation. Culture is stolen, pilfered, appropriated and traded by those who have the privilege to usurp it. On this issue, it is useful to consider the objection to overtly appropriated work as a different kind of constraint where the community responds to artwork being stolen instead of remaining silent on centuries long colonial and neo-colonial practices. 

Canadian (Québécois) theatre director Robert Lepage’s SLĀV as well as Ariane Mnouchkine’s and Lepage’s censored play Kanata are perfect examples of appropriation that triggered a strong community response. The projects that have been surrounded by controversies for their defense of appropriation and the advocacy of their directors for the right to “othering”—ignorant of the discontent of the communities they purportedly speak for and about. 

SLĀV, A Play without Blacks

Robert Lepage’s SLĀV was a project on Black slavery, a play with a predominately white cast, picking cotton and singing Black slave songs. The play was scheduled for June 2018, part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. It was widely condemned by members of Quebec’s Black and Indigenous communities. Protests erupted outside the theatre accusing Lepage of appropriating “black pain for profit.”(13) Lepage acknowledged “clumsiness and misjudgments” that led to the cancellation of the show, while he promised “to do better.”(14)

Nevertheless, shortly after the cancellation, Lepage became more emboldened and denounced what he called an “angry far-left mob” for protesting and shutting down the show. He attempted to divide and conquer within the ranks of the protestors after he met with a group of them. He declared fervently: “Unlike the angry far-left extremists depicted in certain media, the people I met with were welcoming, open, perceptive, intelligent, cultivated, articulate and peaceful.”(15) Obviously, Lepage would rather deal with “perceptive, intelligent, and peaceful” protesters rather than face the legitimate anger of the “mob” he deplores. Either way the community response was justified, since, as Moses Sumney (an African-American singer-songwriter who cancelled his performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival in protest of the play) stated: 

there is no context in which white people performing black slave songs is okay. Especially not while they are dressed like poor field workers or cotton pickers. Especially not while they are directed by a white director and in a theater charging loads of money ... This kind of black imitation is very reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows. The only thing missing is black paint.(16)

This controversy produced one of the most vehement community responses (after The Fairies are Thirsty) as a legitimate criticism and denunciation based on ethical ground. The Montreal chapter of Black Lives Matter organized the protest and mobilized a large coalition against the work dubbed “the SLĀV Resistance Collective”. Protestors took to the streets with signs that read: “Racisme ordinaire” [“ordinary racism”]; “descendants of slaves against SLĀV”; and “Slave songs weren’t written for white people to profit from.” After the first round of protests and more meetings with the Collective, an attempt was made to revive the play, without success.(17)

Kanata without Indigenous People

In a similar fashion, but in a more forceful way, the play Kanata generated an even larger controversy in July 2018. The show was scheduled for staging in Paris in December 2018, and in Québec in 2020, as a co-production between Robert Lepage and Ariane Mnouchkine—director of Paris based Théâtre du Soleil. Kanata claimed to explore Canada’s history “through the lens of the relationship between white and Aboriginal people.” However, there were no Indigenous actors or creators involved in the production. The announcement of the play’s premiere sparked a letter to Montréal’s newspaper Le Devoir on 14 July 2018. The letter, titled “One more time our story will be told without us, Indigenous People,” was signed by a large group of people who are Indigenous artists and community leaders, allies, intellectuals, members of arts organizations, social justice activists, cultural workers, lawyers, theatre artists, actors and producers, and so on.(18) They protested the fact that no Indigenous artists were involved in the production and none were consulted as the play was getting ready for staging. Mnouchkine and Lepage may be well-intentioned in wanting to tell the story of settler-colonial contact with Indigenous people in Kanata (the native name of Canada from the Huron-Iroquois word meaning “village” or “settlement”), however, they miss the point by perpetuating the invisibility of First Nations or Indigenous artists. The letter concluded by saying that the signatories do not wish to censure the production, but preferred if Indigenous artists and talent were included, recognized and celebrated, because, as they say, “WE ARE.”(19) The show was cancelled for the Paris production in December 2018 after a few Lepage co-producers withdrew financial support from the production making it impossible to proceed. 

Lepage and Mnouchkine have maintained and fought for their right to say and do art whichever way they see fit, accusing their detractors of censorship and muzzling. The cancelled show in Paris was revamped in a shorter version carrying a new title: Kanata - Episode 1. La controverse. It opened 15 December 2018 at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, the home of the Théâtre du Soleil outside Paris, as part of the Festival d’Automne. It went on to be produced at the Naples Theatre Festival in Italy in June 2019, followed by the July 2019 production at the Epidaurus & Athens Festival. The play stopped touring after the Athens production, which is considered a much shorter run than the usual Théâtre du Soleil productions. A documentary video produced by Hélène Choquette entitled Lepage au Soleil: à l'origine de Kanata was made between 2016 and 2018 and shown in Canadian cinemas in 2019. After this documentary, the play was not talked about except in the context of critical analysis of its controversy.(20)

I will now turn to the reception of the revised Paris production and the meaning of community-based censorship in response to the modified version that saw the stage at the Théâtre du Soleil, with Lepage as a guest director, marking the first time the company has invited a guest director to work for free. The revised version lasted two and a half hours and included a cast of thirty-three actors, with a revamped title and story. Mnouchkine insisted begrudgingly that there will be no actors from North America. The show ran until February 2019. The reception was, at best, mixed, and at worst, highly negative. Marianne Ackerman of the Montreal Gazette newspaper describes the opening scene with great reservation and significant disapproval: 

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.(21)

Ackermann continues with her sceptical assessment as the series of horror stories play out on stage:

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.(22)

In the middle of these neo-colonial horrors, and Pickton’s terror, we are invited to witness and empathize with a French couple, Miranda and Ferdinand, an artist and a painter arriving in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, around the year 2000.(23) Ferdinand struggles to get acting roles, while Miranda paints portrait of the murdered Indigenous women much to the dismay and consternation of their grieving mothers. La Controverse (the controversy in the title), emerges from Miranda’s plan to exhibit her work at a local community center but, at the last minute, the center directors realize she didn’t ask the families of the victims for permission. This results in the cancelling of the exhibition. In this complex social setting, one Indigenous character in the play opines: “Our history has been stolen from us for 400 years…Expect some strong reactions.” Miranda replies: “I’m an artist! These women moved me as human beings, not Indigenous people.” The ending is equally clunky and unwieldy: Miranda painting an abstract piece in her studio while crying censorship as she laments: “Nowadays, to understand a black person, you have to be black! To understand a Jewish person, you have to be Jewish!”(24)

The fact that Lepage and Mnouchkine put together such shows is not surprising: much of their work has had Orientalist and appropriative overtones in distinctive ways. Lepage’s Zulu Time (2002) had mainly white actors playing a cast of international and African characters; The Dragon Trilogy (1987, 1991, and 2010) was a six-hour epic that told the story of a Quebec family’s relationships with immigrants from China and Japan. The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1996) was set in Hiroshima and Terezin. As for the Théâtre du Soleil’s works: L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (1987) deals with India’s partition; L’Histoire terrible et inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk roi du Cambodge (1985) retells the story of modern Cambodia through the eyes of the descendants of the victims of the Khmer Rouge; Tambours sur la digue (1999) was a Bunraku play with human puppets that told the story of floods in China. Many of Lepage’s and Mnouchkine’s plays use borrowed forms to tell the story of the other under the guise of interculturalism.

Without entering into a lengthy debate on interculturalism and its detractors, suffice it to say that interculturalism is no longer a valid excuse to appropriate the story of the “other” even if the masterpieces that Lepage and Mnouchkine produce regularly garner a lot of acclaim from international, mostly white audiences. Although the two prominent directors often claim that they are fighting injustices and speaking for disenfranchised groups, they continue to appropriate other cultural forms and speak for them. Can Lepage and Mnouchkine ignore the communities’ concerns and continue advocating for a post-racial, post-identitarian, world art in which the actor should be able to play anyone and become the other, as Mnouchkine says frequently? Is there any legitimacy for Lepage’s dismissal when he says: “When it is forbidden to identify with someone else, theatre becomes ‘meaningless’”?(25)

One might ask: meaningless for whom? Is there ever an ethics of appropriation? Is there such a theatre that can be at the same time a guarantor of meaning making for disenfranchised communities, a safe, affirmative space for racialized or gendered identities without resorting to silencing, occupying, or appropriating? It is a fine balance between artistic freedom and the right to free speech and literal cultural theft—museums and collections are still full of pilfered art and artifacts by colonial powers (there would be no museums in the Western world without artefacts stolen from the colonies). White entertainers continue to profit off of Black musical styles while Black performers continue to be impeded by racism. I am not arguing for or against censoring appropriative work, nor am I claiming that these artists are being unfairly censored. I am simply exercising the questions that are missing in the debate around intercultural theatre. We need not ask if artists have the right to speak or represent any culture; rather, we should ask: What has intercultural theatre done to reduce the harm done by slavery, colonialism, othering, orientalism, stereotyping? Is casting a whole show on slavery without Black actors the postmodern version of blackface or a contemporary version of nineteenth century minstrel shows? Is doing an entire show on contact between Settlers and Indigenous people without any significant participation of the Indigenous community really that far removed from ethnological expositions, which literally put indigenous people as “savages” on display in the nineteenth century? 

Conversely, I am not justifying or condoning the censorship of these works, I’m proposing to look at them with a different lens that challenges their methods and interrogates the norms by which societies construct dominant culture and excludes, silences, or fetishizes the other. I will conclude this section with the words of Indigenous (Anishinaabe) writer and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm who sums it up perfectly in an article in the Globe and Mail: 

if the past 30 years have taught us anything, it is that there is a powerful, loud bunch of privileged white settlers who do not want to learn about us or from us. They spew out their impressions of our experience and double down when confronted with research and data and our first-hand accounts. They want to “debate” appropriation, on their terms and make these demands as if it has not been done before. As if the past 30 years of our work is meaningless because they are unaware and do not have to bother doing the research. For us, to continue to debate at this point is nothing but a type of busy work that pulls Indigenous writers and publishers away from what we ought to be doing – namely, writing, telling and publishing our own stories.(26)

III. The Runner 

I conclude this article with a brief analysis of the events surrounding Christopher Morris’s play The Runner at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver 2024. The Runner had its first production at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in 2018, followed by six different productions in cities across Canada to much acclaim. It won three Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto’s awards for excellence in theatre) for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Production, and Outstanding Direction. The play was scheduled to open at the PuSh Festival in 2024. But in agreement with the playwright, the festival cancelled the play after it received an open letter of protest from a collective of Palestinian, Indigenous, and Jewish community members who expressed concerns about the play’s portrayal of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the current thorny context. The censorship of the play was complicated by another protest by Palestinian artist (based in England), Basel Zaraa, whose installation/performance Dear Laila was also scheduled to open at the same festival. Zaraa issued a statement that he would pull his performance if the festival went ahead with The Runner.

The Runner tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox Z.A.K.A. member, Jacob, who decides to treat a young Palestinian woman instead of an injured Israeli soldier who the woman may have killed in an alleged attack. The Z.A.K.A. (Zihuy Korbanot Ason, or Disaster Victim Identification) is an Israeli volunteer force comprised of paramedics and disaster relief workers who respond to scenes of violent attacks and collect the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they may receive proper Jewish religious burial. Jacob is torn between his duty to attend to Israeli victims and the decision he made to give the woman CPR even though she is suspected of carrying out the attack.

The backlash against the play at PuSh was due in large part to the timing (a few months after the October 7 attacks) as audiences are more and more divided on the Israel-Palestine conflict. What interests me here is the consequences of the censorship as both artists and PuSh Festival put out a statement acknowledging the harm the play may cause to Palestinians and the disappointment and anger of some members of the community who supported Morris. Alongside Morris’s statement, saying that he is saddened and unsettled “when Canadian theatres cannot be a space for the public to engage in a dynamic exchange of ideas,”(27) a joint statement from the directors of PuSh, Gabrielle Martin and Keltie Forsyth, as well as Zaraa and Morris was issued. It reads:

On January 2nd, we released a statement that expressed our hope that PuSh bring us together and inspire us to have complex and nuanced conversations; to challenge ourselves and each other not only to think differently, but to feel differently…Over the past two weeks, we have been in conversation with various members of our community. We have heard those who call to cancel The Runner, feeling it is a work that perpetuates the oppression of Palestinian people. We have heard the call to present it by those who feel the work provides an empathetic, and fundamentally humanist perspective. We have also heard from those who believe theatre is the right place for difficult conversations and want us to resist censorship. We have heard the call that now is not the right time…And we have felt the desire to uphold relationships with artists. We have felt the anger expressed to us. But most importantly, we have felt the words of Festival artist Basel Zaraa.(28)

The festival also included a statement from Basel Zaraa:

Dear Laila is an installation I created for my young daughter, which tells the story of our family’s ongoing trauma and struggle as Palestinians exiled by Israel, starting with the massacre in our village of Tantura in Palestine, in 1948. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, I cannot agree for Dear Laila to be shown alongside The Runner, a play which reinforces dehumanising narratives about Palestinians. Palestinians appear in The Runner almost exclusively as perpetrators of violence. While the Israeli characters are vividly portrayed, the Palestinian characters don't even have names, and barely speak…While many voices are welcome, artistic endeavors on this subject have a responsibility to reflect the reality that there is an occupier and an occupied.(29)

To add to the mix, a statement from Christopher Morris was also issued. It reads:

The Runner is a fictional story about an Israeli man who saves the life of a young Palestinian woman and is ostracized by his peers for doing so. It is an award-winning, one-person play, told from the singular perspective of a man who confronts his community’s fear and their dehumanization of others. Criticised by his own people, his empathy never wavers. For me, The Runner is a nuanced play about the need to see the humanity of others. Basel Zaraa's voice is new to Canadians and his installation Dear Laila—also nuanced & award-winning— focuses on his family experience as Palestinians exiled by Israel. It is an extraordinary, important work. Holding space for other viewpoints is essential, particularly at this moment of trauma and division. I sympathize with the PuSh Festival’s distress when Basel shared that he’d withdraw his work if The Runner remained in the festival; and when they arrived at their difficult decision to prioritize one artist’s voice over another. PuSh’s leadership has navigated this complicated situation with transparency and care. If removing The Runner is the only way Canadians can hear Basel’s crucial voice, then there is value in stepping aside…(30)

In light of Zaraa’s and Morris’ statements, the festival concluded that the Runner should be cancelled and Zaraa’s performance should proceed: 

As a Festival, we respect Basel’s perspective. We will honour the artist whose work reflects their lived experience and cancel the presentations of The Runner by Canadian playwright Christopher Morris, whose work is rooted in years of research but who has no religious or cultural ties to the region. . . .At the same time, we believe it is a necessary choice to prioritize the work of an artist whose perspective is grossly underrepresented in Canadian theatre and performance culture.(31)

I choose to cite these statements whole and in block by the artists and the PuSH Festival producers to show the level of engagement in complex and ambiguous censoring and how oppositions and dichotomy do not always play out in predictable ways. What The Runner case (and other recent cases) shows us is that the centers of power that govern censorship have become diffuse, which hints to what Gilles Deleuze called a “society of control” in his Post-Script on the Societies of Control. Deleuze delineates contemporary forms of control by government, socio-cultural and administrative regulations as operating according to different mechanisms than the conventional “normative” modes of (Foucault’s) “disciplinary powers.”(32) Deleuze’s thesis is particularly relevant for an analysis of contemporary theatre censorship in the era of networked communications, social media, and decentered power. 

I return to Jansen to elucidate how these diffuse centers of power in liberal democracies operate using covert censorship where there is, on the surface, a guarantee of free speech, which also becomes a commodity, but in practice, there is self-inflicted or socially sanctioned suppression that reshapes public discourse with new imperatives.(33) In this context we may not know clearly whose interests censorship serves, but we are saddled with its consequences on social and cultural ambits as the battleground is no longer between the “questionable material” and official entities, but in a network pitting various socio-cultural values and communities against each other. 

Conclusion

Is this cancel culture or “call out” culture that produces decentered censorship a danger to theatrical freedom? Certainly, this form of censorship may run the risk of shutting down conversations that we expect the performing arts to foster in the current chilling climate of division, fear, and bias. Conversely, under-represented communities in the theatre have taken up the fight and protested against the structures that organize their exclusion in the art. Their “call outs” may have become more effective at combating racism, sexism, silencing, and marginalization, since neoliberal identity politics—the so-called “dialogue of cultures” and the “right of anyone to play anyone”—are no longer suitable to address the imbalance of power occasioned by unfettered representability. Irrevocably, questions of community censorship underline the dichotomy between the ethical and the questionable, the center and the margin, the represented and the under-represented, the mainstream and the absented. But more importantly, it underscores the reciprocal awareness of the falsity of these dichotomies, necessitating a third term. The third term is perhaps the collective “we” that the theatre can endorse in its gathering albeit irreconcilable space.