Great. I get to be the white guy who says he didn’t much care for Indigenous artist Cliff Cardinal’s solo show As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement.
I went into the evening hoping for challenge and provocation, but I didn’t get either.
My expectation and disappointment are related to the show’s reputation. When Crow’s Theatre first mounted this project in 2021, it was billed as As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, so folks showed up expecting Shakespeare, but what they got was Cardinal delivering a “land acknowledgement” that turned into a 90-minute examination of anti-Indigenous racism and stereotyping. That’s a great device and it must have produced some fantastic tensions in early performances.
But that bait-and-switch no longer exists: for The Cultch run at least, the title has changed. Those of us seeing this production in Vancouver in 2024, know we’re not going to get Shakespeare. And we have good reason to expect that colonialism’s going to be on the menu. Fair enough.
But, in my experience, As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement simply repeats ideas that are already comfortably familiar to me; I suspect that will be true for most folks in the audience. And, in my opinion, the show’s not very theatrical.
The play’s baseline argument is, of course, about land acknowledgements. “What does a land acknowledgement accomplish other than make white people feel good about themselves?” Cardinal asks. Exactly. Land acknowledgements are, however tepidly, recognitions of injustice, so I wouldn’t entirely dismiss them, but they feel hollow without concrete follow-up in terms of reconciliation. This is worth saying. It’s also an idea I’m guessing most of us have considered.
I also appreciated Cardinal’s take on the conflation of indigeneity and climate consciousness, the notion that Indigenous folks are climate saviours, climate purists, which is, after all, a stereotype.
But, in terms of analysis, that’s about all I got from As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement: a couple of worthy ideas that were already in my head — and the show lasts an hour and a half.
The script’s structure gets repetitive. In one of its basic devices, Cardinal performs a kind of catch-and-release, as one of my friends describes it. He takes the argument about environmental noble-savageism, for instance, and turns it on its head. Having made the point that Indigenous people can be as blasé as anybody else about the climate catastrophe, he reminds us that Indigenous cultures are often more connected to the earth than settler cultures. But he uses this device again and again, to diminishing effect — for me at least.
And the performance, which is mostly a form of stand-up comedy, is almost entirely a collection of abstract ideas, a kind of spoken essay. There’s very little storytelling.
For me, The Land Acknowledgement didn’t land until at least three-quarters of the way through, when Cardinal addressed the horrors of residential schools. At that point, he drops his catch-and-release playfulness and sinks into the weight of the material. He also starts using concrete details, for the first time in the evening, in resonant ways. How far were the children’s unmarked graves, he wonders, from the back doors of those schools? And how much was the distance determined by convenience? How much by the need for secrecy?
And, shortly after the residential school section, Cardinal engages in the only full narratives of the evening, stories about women he knows who are addressing dysfunction in the best ways they know.
Context matters, of course. I’ve heard about a performance in Alberta in which oil executives got into a shouting match with more liberal audience members. And, about 20 minutes into the opening night performance of the Vancouver run, which I attended, a woman at the back of the house yelled at Cardinal to fuck off, and the guy she was with approached the stage, complaining that Cardinal knows nothing about Indigenous culture — in his opinion. (I don’t know if these folks are Indigenous or not.) So As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement clearly still has the power to provoke, which is a good thing. But I doubt the show will provoke many in Vancouver’s liberal theatregoing audience. I suspect it will function more like a land acknowledgement, providing us with an opportunity to feel good about ourselves.
AS YOU LIKE IT OR THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT By Cliff Cardinal. Produced by Crow’s Theater, where Chris Abraham is the artistic director. On Thursday, September 26. Running at The Cultch’s York Theatre until Sunday September 29. Tickets
(Publicity photo of Cliff Cardinal by Dahlia Katz)
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