Cliff Cardinal performing ‘Huff’, Photo Jamie Williams
It’s rare that I feel genuine fear during a theatrical experience. Cliff Cardinal’s solo show Huff, a Cunning Concepts & Creations production presented by Crow’s Theatre, opens with a moment of intense visceral anxiety. The lights come up on him with a plastic zip-lock bag duct-taped over his head and his hands restrained. As he breathes, the awful plastic expands and contracts, fogging up as his air becomes toxic there in front of us—it feels genuinely dangerous and awful.
He eventually gets a front-row patron to take it off, just before the crucial three minutes he warned us about run out—this particular attempt to escape life’s torments has been aborted, and breath continues, for now. This begins his pleading, antagonistic and fourth wall-breaking relationship to us. Embodying, mainly, the middle brother (named Wind) of an Indigenous trio who lost their mother to suicide, his reminiscences and provocations pull us ever downward into a painful reservation life. He conjures a world where the adults in these boys’ lives, still reeling from a history of oppressive institutional mistreatment, can do little more than continue cycles of abuse.
You can tell they care deeply though, especially his slow yet steady Kokum (grandmother) who is a real badass. Sneaking around them, an abstracted presence, is Trickster—a shadowy archetypal figure that follows all, manifesting in small, irksome occurrences that make life’s journey so precarious. Trickster seems ever-present, especially in Wind’s mischievous energy. We catch glimpses of this spirit in the many characters he portrays as he wraps his story around us, a wet and scratchy blanket that chafes even while it protects.
Director Karin Randoja has an instinctive knack for clarifying the purposeful intent of Cardinal’s frequently manic presence. The way each character inhabits the space is defined by distinct and evocative shifts in the quality of voice and movement. Harnessing the design team’s talents, light (Michelle Ramsay) and sound (Alex Williams) seem convincing manifestations of his state of mind. As the brothers indulge in huffing solvents and choking games, with hands or tightened belts at throats, plunging them into desperate oblivion, Wind’s hallucinations envelop the whole space. An eerie DJ delivers ominous comments about the psychological weather and a fever dream, demented game show is particularly absurd.
Cardinal is a master of vivid, abject grotesqueries blended with prankish humour. He confidently skirts along that fluctuating line where, if crossed, we’d be pushed irrevocably away by the abject horrors of scene. He dances along this boundary, his hypnotic hold on us firm. Of the many disquieting vignettes, I was impressed by his handling of the eldest brother’s frequent sexual abuse of his younger siblings. His evocative use of an overturned chair is an astonishing moment that conveys the hurtful sensuality with a lyrical fervour that’s fully discomfiting.
From the opening moments—when strange noises up in the theatre’s rafters alert us to a creeping, potentially sinister presence—to the final transcendent gesture of hope in the face of overwhelming despair; Cardinal’s Huff feels like a lungful of agonized breath held and finally released.
Huff
running April 23 to 28, 2024
Streetcar Crowsnest, Guloien Theatre (345 Carlaw Ave.)
running time: 70 minutes (no intermission)
Cliff Cardinal performing ‘Huff’, Photo Jamie Williams