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.