Huff: life on the edge!

Photo of Cliff Cardinal courtesy of NAC English Theatre

An extremely talented young performance artist, Cliff Cardinal, a true theatre warrior, is clearly committed to an art form that makes a difference, an art that builds social relevance and social awareness. In his own words, he is exploring a world that has been neglected by theatre practitioners in Canada, one that addresses “Canada’s most taboo subculture: First Nations youth abusing solvents, at high risk of suicide.”

The first tableau has that kind of shock value that the Surrealists sought in order to transform the perception of the onlooker and send him/her off into another dimension of reality well beyond rational thought. Remember the razor blade in the Bunuel film Le Chien andalou, slicing the eye open as the girl gazes at the moon ? Well this is worse because it is not a movie where images can be cut and selected. Cardinal begins with a shocking image of Wind, a young man living on a reserve with his two brothers. Their mother has committed suicide and Wind is in such a state that he feels this is the end and he starts the show by trying to commit suicide: hands tied behind his back, plastic bag wrapped around his head and tightly secured around his next. It appears so realistic that a buzz begins in the audience, as people hope this isn’t serious. There are huge translucent sheets of plastic hanging from the walls of the studio as a backdrop and as the actor appears to slip into near unconsciousness, the lights flash, the sound vibrates and we are taken soaring into space, as he is lifted into the upper echelons in a realm somewhere between depression and a manic high. This time, he is accompanied by the demonic side of the traditional trickster, the fellow who appears in Tomson Highway’s theatre, the one who entices him into the new reality between the present world and the invisible one. All these hallucinatory journeys which suddenly flash into sight, are fuelled by gasoline sniffing trips or pass out choking games. They send the brothers into the arms of the Trickster, the shape shifting spirit who moves between the earth and the superior place, interrupted by his representation of moments with their parents on the reserve where family life is a constant nightmare and never seems real.

Wind and his brothers find themselves with his father and his new woman who insists on wearing the dead mother’s clothes, something that troubles the boys to no end. His texts relating to that are so upsetting because they come from the depth of the boys sadness and are the only authentic expressions of the way they feels about her disappearance. Also in this family milieu we meet the grandfather and the grandmother. She tries to defend them all but the voices of the boys fore ground their own story, as Cardinal like the very trickster himself, changes shape, changes his voice, changes his sound and becomes the voices that establishes the link between them all. He is quite amazing. Their encounter with the smelly skunk turns into nasty humour that is extremely painful. The experiences they have at the residential school are funny, angry and terrible. Wind mocks and mimics their “ratface”, teacher. They play angry and dangerous games of humiliation among themselves where physical abuse, violence and deeply demeaning relations, scar these young men for life. And the actor addresses it all. The texts are fragments, the words are reduced to the limit of verbal expression but he creates much of it with his body, his movements, the musical accompaniment, the sounds he makes, the way he handles props. He knows how to use the stage.

Caught in a maelstrom of confusion, of hopelessness, with the help of the “huff”, as they sniff their lives away or choke themselves into oblivion, a near death wish appears to permeate this world. We can see and smell the existential filth piling up and snuffing out their lives, and in the midst of this, we hear the eerie music of Marilyn Manson, who tells us that “drugs and music are the strongest form of magic”. Is he the incarnation of the trickster that Cardinal is watching? Cardinal said in a talkback the other night that he listened to Manson’s music as he worked on this performance and the atmosphere of that anti-Christ superstar is buried somewhere in Cardinal’s performing subconscious. Even the voices he captures on stage are imitations of Manson’s voice. The images of blood (only tomato sauce), dirt and filth, relate back  to this haunting creature that definitely incarnates the demonic presence of a very disturbing but attractive native trickster who emerges from the world of inhaled gasoline fumes.

One feels that this young man is moving on the edge. It is almost frightening..

Go see this HUFF plays until May 10 in the Studio of the NAC.

Huff   Written and performed by Cliff Cardinal

A Cardinal/Kantor Production (Toronto)

Directed by Karin Randoja

Designed by Elizabeth kantor

Lighting by  Rebecca Miller