Marcus Merasty performing Golden Rez Dog | Photo by Philippe Latour
Co-presented with Citadel + Compagnie
At only 45 minutes, the most astonishing aspect of Marcus Merasty’s performance art dance piece, Golden Rez Dog, is how simultaneously contained and expansive it feels. With minimal production elements, all carefully aligned, this solo performance gives the hypnotic impression of both an individual ordeal and a generational accumulation of experience manifesting in a singular body.
We open on a bare stage, save for a green chalkboard lying horizontally, slightly off-kilter, and the projected image of an unassuming patch of charred grass and trash. The KFC cup in particular feels sort of galling. Merasty, a multidisciplinary Cree performer, begins by smudging the space. After this ritual, dressed in leather chaps and cowboy boots (the discordant cultural signifiers already rattling about), they get on their knees, chalk in hand, and spend some time filling the chalkboard with text.
The angle prevents us from seeing the text properly, but some post-show digging has revealed it is a poem by their aunt Francine Merasty, “The Old Rez Dog,” on which their piece is partially inspired. With the poem set down, Merasty then picks up a garbage bag and begins a mostly stationary yet utterly arduous journey which is best described by the word struggle.
The poem, representing both their own dutiful transcription and the rez-life of their aunt, is smudged and obscured as they uncomfortably try to make progress. During the exasperating, drawn-out effort, the chalk is smeared across the stage and their own body, which now seems their primary, oppressive obstacle. Their plight manifests as a series of small, strained, purposeful movements causing an outrage of spasms. It is a distressing, intimate, almost excruciatingly slow yet deeply fascinating spectacle.
It is very intriguing, and rather disconcerting, how thoroughly Merasty keeps turned away from us. Even in most forward-facing moments, their face is obscured by clothing or some poetic prop. It got to the point where I desperately wanted to catch a glimpse of their face. When it happens, I found it strangely exhilarating.
During this struggle, a collection props fall out from the increasingly torn garbage, they are both familiar and alienating in their new context. As Merasty contorts their body with violent stomping and repurposes boots and clothing, their appearance begins to register as vaguely dog-like and it’s here that Merasty’s other inspiration—an ancient Greek story by Lucius Apuleius, “The Golden Ass,” where a man turns into a donkey and back again—rises to the forefront and the theme of transformation crystallizes.
Sound artist, George Stamos, has built an eerie sonic landscape around Merasty. The impression is one of radio signals coming in and out, the struggle to secure a connection resulting in discomfiting feedback. At one point, a country song (“Neon Moon”) gets through and its sappy heartbreak is both jarring and resonant. “There’s always room here for the lonely, to watch your broken dreams dance in and out of the beams of a neon moon.”
Merasty has also incorporated a recording made of his grandmother relating her travels and settling on the land where her grandchildren would grow up. Once you are aware of aware the family connections here (which I was only after the fact), this piece comes into clearer focus as a portrait of Merasty acknowledging their place in a larger, fraught trajectory—a sense of Indigenous history as a visceral, embodied reality.
Golden Rez Dog
@ SummerWorks 2026
August 7 & 8, 2026
The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance
Mimi Herrndorf Studio Theatre
(304 Parliament Street)
45 minutes
