Picture associated with WINDIGO, a performance in the Kia Mau Festival. Two men sit in a canoe which is on concrete. They are wrapped in blankets.Wow, did I mis­un­der­stand the mar­ket­ing for this show. “Fierce and vis­cer­al, Windigo res­on­ates like a scream, the vibrant echo of a long his­tory of hu-man ran­sack­ing and destruc­tion, a viol­a­tion of a land and its cul­ture.” I went in bra­cing myself for the emo­tion­al equi­val­ent of a hur­ricane. This is not that. For me, it’s much closer in spir­it to the pic­ture included here. Unusu­al, unset­tling, meas­ured and com­pel­ling.

This per­form­ance piece has come out of research cho­reo­graph­er Lara Kramer was doing around the Res­id­en­tial School that “three gen­er­a­tions of her fam­ily endured. It also evolved out of field work she was doing at her mother’s home in Lac Seul First Nation, in north­west­ern Ontario.” The three per­formers, Kramer, Jassem Hindi and Peter James, are on stage when we go into the theatre. They’re sit­ting on two mat­tresses. There’s anoth­er mat­tress wrapped in plastic at the back. To one side there’s a pile of clear plastic sheet­ing. On the oth­er, shoved into the back corner, is a pile of clothes. The sound of crack­ing starts while the house lights are still on. As they fade oth­er night­time noises start. Kramer stands then moves to sit to one side where she stays mix­ing the sound for the rest of the show.

For what seems like a long time noth­ing hap­pens. The men scratch their necks or their ankles. They switch pos­i­tions, curl­ing around their mat­tress like it’s a teddy bear. Hindi pulls a flick knife out of his back pock­et. He runs a hand over his mat­tress then frantic­ally cuts into it, rip­ping out a piece of stuff­ing and shov­ing it into his mouth where he chews away at it. James finds his own flick knife. He uses it to cut into the sides of his mat­tress, thread­ing blue and yel­low rope through the holes. At one point he drinks from a water bottle then squishes it into the mat­tress as the plastic crumples and crackles. I feel like things are hap­pen­ing but they’re the meta­phor­ic­al ice­berg – I can only see the very top of it, and I under­stand even less.

While won­der­ing what the heck I was going to write in this review, I came to the con­clu­sion that I’d been col­on­ised by the idea that I had to inter­pret this piece on an intel­lec­tu­al level. That to make sense of it I needed to know what the mat­tresses were a meta­phor for, wheth­er the plastic sheet­ing rep­res­en­ted destruc­tion, envir­on­ment­al col­lapse or some­thing else. Instead I should have trus­ted my heart which pulled me, lean­ing toward the work. I should have trus­ted my breath, bated in anti­cip­a­tion as to what was going to hap­pen next. I should have trus­ted in the silence after the show fin­ished in dark­ness and the audi­ence refused to applaud, refused to break the spell we’d been under until the lights came back up again and the per­formers stepped for­ward to bow.