SNOWBLIND, YET ALL-SEEING
Latest Running Coyote solo show haunting, mesmerizing, but could push a little further
Spend an hour with Zach Running Coyote and you know you are in the presence of genius.
Running Coyote is a multi-talented artist who has written and is performing in his latest solo show, Snowblind, for Lunchbox Theatre until March 7. The show was created in conjunction with Making Treaty 7 where Running Coyote is the artist-in-residence. He was asked to create a show based on the Blackfoot legend of Napi, a trickster often called The Old Man who can be a creator, a fool or even a brutal murderer.
Never one to shy away from introspection, Running Coyote makes the trickster in his story all three, and even includes the demon alcohol that was responsible for Running Coyote’s own fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
Running Coyote first plays Ruth, an Indigenous elder who runs a drop-in centre and coffee house in her home. He also plays Napi, a man who has spent much of his life in prison and is trying to cope with being on his own on the street. Napi is singing in downtown Calgary to earn change when Ruth hears him. She is won over by his voice and invites him to stay at her home. Most people stay a night or two but Ruth tells Napi that if he sings and brings visitors into the coffee house he can make her home his own.
Ruth and the audience learn something about Napi’s past. She can’t handle this revelation and casts him back onto the street. Lonely and heartbroken, Ruth is listening to a radio show in which the artist Zach Running Coyote is discussing his battles with fetal alcohol spectrum.
At regular intervals, Napi goes to a microphone to sing and at other times, in a kind of dream state, he dances. Watching Running Coyote inhabit Ruth and then sing and dance as Napi is mesmerizing but so is the story and the characters Running Coyote has created because, at its heart, Snowblind is a beautiful and tragic love story.
As powerful, moving and haunting as Running Coyote’s writing, singing, acting and dancing are, he has done himself and the Lunchbox audiences a disservice because, with one annoying device, he hobbles himself.
Within the play, Ruth listens to a radio. We hear Running Coyote’s voice but that’s not enough. We need to see him speaking because that third character is vital. We all have the opportunity to meet this incredible artist as we leave the theatre but we need to meet him first within the play. Anyone who saw Running Coyote’s earlier solo play, Kohkum & Me, knows he can switch personalities in a heartbeat and there is no limit to the number of personalities he can handle.
Running Coyote and his director, Justin Many Fingers, rely on the disembodied voice trick for one of the most crucial moments in the play when Ruth and Napi argue as she exiles him from her home, life and heart and we need to see both of these people, not just Ruth.
Snowblind is a most memorable experience, but it could have been just that bit more dynamic and that is its only fault.