As artistic director of Ex Machina, creator of some of Cirque du Soleil’s best-loved shows, and a major name in international theatre, Robert Lepage is Quebec royalty. He has been making beautiful, influential theatre art for 40 years.

He’s also had his latest two productions cancelled because of (divisive terminology klaxon) cultural appropriation.

Slav was a choreographed recital of African-American slave songs. It had an all-white production team, a white lead singer, and a predominantly white cast, who were dressed as cotton pickers. Hip-hop artist and historian Aly Ndiaye was brought in as a consultant. He stressed the need for more black people on stage. A consultant is not a co-director, however, and Lepage did not listen.

Slav was pulled from its prestigious Montréal Jazz festival slot amid public outcry, demonstrations and the withdrawal of African-American musician Moses Sumney from the festival.

Lepage’s response was to leave complex discussions of cultural appropriation to others; as a veteran artist, he explained that theatre is all about pretending to be other people, and that it is devastating to artistic freedom if artists cannot slip into another person’s shoes.

This unwillingness to engage with the core issues of race and representation that underlie the issue of who gets to wear whose shoes is doubtless part of what led production companies to pull funding from a second piece, Kanata, a collaboration with renowned Parisian theatre company Théâtre du Soleil and director Ariane Mnouchkine.

Kanata was to have dramatised the relationship between Canada’s white settlers and First Nations, without involving any First Nations artists. Indigenous artists, activists and leaders wrote an open letter to Lepage and Mnouchkine, passionately explaining how tired they were of art that was about them, without them. A six-hour meeting between the directors and the signatories followed, in which, various accounts suggest, the directors did not listen.

In theatre and performance studies, this is well-trodden ground. Similar conversations about directors such as Lepage and Mnouchkine have been happening since the 1980s, as part of the study of intercultural theatre. The discourse around the ethics and politics of this kind of work became so heated in the 90s and early 2000s that theatre scholar Ric Knowles dubbed it “the interculture wars”.

In the late 70s and early 80s, “performance studies” arose from a new anthropologically inflected approach to the performing arts. The US scholar and artist Richard Schechner, who coined the term, galvanised the field. A key driver of the discipline was to move beyond the exclusive study of the western theatrical canon and also give due scholarly attention to the performance traditions of non-western peoples and cultures.

Scholars and artists wove these traditions into their creative work and teaching, considering such practice “intercultural”. It was all very humanistic – battling the bitter fuddy-duddies who wanted to exclude all but dead white men from university curricula. What could go wrong?

Fuddy-duddies were not the only ones who took issue with interculturalism. In the early 80s Schechner became entangled in a fraught public debate with Indian theatremaker and intellectual Rustom Bharucha. Schechner believed intercultural theatre should be celebrated because it allowed people to influence one another and learn from one another. He saw cultural exchange as a two-way street.

Bharucha, conversely, saw the intercultural projects conducted by many western scholars and practitioners as exploitative and ethnocentric. He asked that western scholars consider the histories and power relations that informed their work.

Before you walk in another person’s shoes, ask if that person wants you to do so. Maybe they need their shoes

The well-intentioned project of admitting performances outside the western canon to university curricula could equally be read as a self-interested attempt to reinvigorate those curricula, keeping western arts programmes profitable. Subjecting the cultural practices of non-western people and cultures to anthropological study and re-enactment was – to borrow a term from Edward Said – “orientalist”. It was “speaking for the other”, reinscribing the very colonial power dynamics that performance studies was ostensibly challenging.

Whew. I’m sure it is a bitter pill, if from one minute to the next you are transformed from an avant-garde humanist visionary into a neocolonial patriarchal exploiter.

We keep having this conversation. Western theatremakers – often coming from a place of respect, even love, for different cultures – take as given that their borrowings can only be complimentary. An assumption of a two-way street of cultural flow stops them from considering: who is profiting from whom?

The interculture wars have lessons to teach anyone in a position of privilege and power (however well-deserved) as they represent marginalised cultures that are not their own.

First, before you walk in another person’s shoes, ask if that person wants you to do so. Maybe they need their shoes. Maybe they’d rather do the walking themselves.

Second, where there’s an historically inscribed power imbalance between the people represented and (to borrow a term from Bharucha) the “maestro”; where there’s a legacy of racist misrepresentation; where there are histories of exploitation, colonialism, and violence, perpetrated precisely by the culture from which the maestro comes and against the people he is representing, then you need to meaningfully include the represented community in the process.

For 40 years, this kind of theatre has been reliably, predictably making people from marginalised constituencies feel exploited and angry.

So, if you want to make a piece of theatre about slave songs, listen when a black consultant tells you there aren’t enough black people on stage. If you want to address indigenous/settler relations, think deeply about where you sit in that history, where you got your power from, and whether you are prepared to relinquish some of it. Otherwise, you’ll get the same old backlash.

Something heartening about the current moment is that publics seem to increasingly agree that it’s weird to tell the story of settler colonialism in Canada without indigenous voices; that there’s something off about white people dressing up as cotton pickers, singing songs communally authored by African-Americans, and profiting from it.

The maestros might be tone deaf, but many other people are listening.

• Emer O’Toole is associate professor of Irish performance studies at Concordia University, Canada