Métis Mutt, at Aki Studio Daniels Spectrum through February 5, 2017

Louis Riel once said, “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Sheldon Elter is the living fulfilment of that promise. This 90-minute Native Earth Performing Arts show imported from Edmonton will have you pressed against the back of your seat and engaged to the point you’ll wonder where the time went.

He jumps right into character — “My name is Sheldon Elter and I’ll be your native comedian for tonight” — grabbing the microphone to spew out a series of jokes that increasingly make all in the audience uncomfortable: What do you call an Indian on a bike? Thief. What do you call two Indians on a bike? Organized crime. Switching moods, gaining traction, this natural mimic and fascinating mover keeps several narratives going, dropping one for another and filling in the missing parts as he goes.

Elter creates a character named Sheldon whose life details are pretty much those of the man himself. His father, Sonny, was native. His mother, whose last name he took, was in her youth a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde. Elter has a brother Derek, three years younger. As children they witnessed the beatings, the alcoholism, the raging arguments between parents and lots more that children should never see.

Switching rapidly from one character to another, Elter gives voice to them all: medicine man, drunken dad, classroom bullies, medical specialists. He plays guitar, singing a hilarious homo-erotic composition about the Lone Ranger and Tonto and a ballad called “Self Love” – neither recommended for family listening. Pieced together with lots of comic interludes is the story of a Metis youth who tries to protect his mother and eventually escapes with her to be raised by a step-father, who drinks and does drugs, stops and relapses, but finally finds his calling – and redemption – on stage. Elter is a born showman: he even does a passing impersonation of a Broadway musical performer.

Just when your sides are splitting from a series of one-liners (“my wet-dream catcher”), Elter slips into a heart-wrenching tale of lost youth. There were 11 years when he didn’t see his father at all and when he and a cousin go to visit the dad in a broken-down trailer, Sonny doesn’t at first recognize his own son.  “At least he was sober,” the actor says.

A generous performer, Elter moves like lightning, breaking into break-dance, then singing a Cree song as he takes us to a northern sweat lodge ceremony. All the action unfolds against an ingenious screen, shaped like half of a circular hide drum, on which are projected images to help set the scene. Elter has been working on Métis Mutt for 17 years. The version here is directed by Edmonton’s Ron Jenkins and it is tight as a drum. Don’t miss it.

Métis Mutt

Created and performed by Sheldon Elter

Director: Ron Jenkins

Set and lighting: Tessa Stamp

Projection designer: T. Erin Gruber

Sound designer: Aaron Macri

Photo: Ryan Parker

Infinite Storms, The Theatre Centre, Toronto, through January 29, 2017

 

By all accounts – including Nova Bhattacharya’s – migraines deliver some of the worst pain humans experience. But headaches, back pain, bowel obstruction, depression, any kind of pain, all have a common effect: they make the sufferer feel alone, watching in agony as everyone else appears to enjoy themselves, or at least function normally.

How such a subject could be effectively explored in a dance and still be called art is amply demonstrated in Nova Bhattacharya’s Infinite Storms.

A thorough and fascinating fusion of eastern and western concepts, dance forms and philosophy, the hour-long piece consists of one reveal after another, the finale the most surprising of all.

As viewers take their seats, four female figures sit in smokey twilight around a central wrapped pillar – a maypole. The saris of three of them are woven into the pole.

Accompanied by the sound of deep, yogic breathing, a fourth, untethered, figure in a sari begins to dance, Bharatanatyam style, playing two hand bells. Gradually the other women unwind their saris, get to their feet and leave their posts, dancing, posing, with modern, balletic and Indian classical gestures intertwined as carefully as the cloths around the maypole. But the pole is actually Bhattacharya, tightly wrapped in darkness up til now and soon looking like a martyr being burned at the stake.

The others – Kate Holden and Molly Johnson, Atri Nundy and Malarvilly Varatharaja – are meanwhile moving, stomping bare feet, swinging arms and making broad facial expressions.

The other thing about pain is that it can quickly turn to pleasure, tears morphing to laughter, or simple relief.

Anyone in the audience could find something to identify with in Infinite Storms and apply a personal interpretation. Opening so soon after the women’s march, this all-female work also evoked the sense of solidarity experienced when one individual in pain connects with another and all find they are not alone, but actually connected in their suffering.

Bhattacharaya’s program notes end on the word “samsara” a Sanskrit term often found in Buddhist teachings to express the circularity and constancy of change in life as we know it. And it is this concept that ties together sound, tabla rhythms, colour changes, dance repetitions and symmetries, in one glorious carnival that ends with a maypole dance and a final, ingenious, laugh-inducing tableau.

Choreographer: Nova Bhattacharya

Collaborator: Louis Laberge-Côté

Performers: Kate Holden, Molly Johnson, Atri Nundy, Malarvilly Varatharaja, Nova Bhattacharya

Lighting: Marc Parent

Costume design: Tina Fushell

Sound/Tabla: Ed Hanley

Handout photo