ADRIAN STIMSON — Naked Napi Big Game Hunter

Performance presented by the CIAC MTL at Cabaret Vol de nuit, 14 Prince-Arthur East Street, Montreal, August 7th 2019, 5:00 pm.

 

Adrian Stimson suggests in a provocative performance a sharp criticism of the great polemical male figures of our world. It presents a creation combining sounds and lights by inviting us to a burlesque and denouncing show.

 

Photos © Guy L’Heureux

 

Naked Napi Big Game Hunter is a performance that plays with patriarchy, male power, power that is often expressed by those who claim to have the biggest dicks and can who can piss the farthest. But Naked Napi knew he had the biggest gun, he knows that all these puppets had little guns, that their mouths Were bigger than their dicks, that now is the time to expose them, to show that the snake is being protected by those who don’t have the balls to realize that they are the puppets and like all of creation, will disappear too.

Naked Napi looked out into the world, he started to notice that the animals were not there anymore? Where did they all go? He also noticed that it was getting hotter and hotter and that the big ice in the mountains were disappearing too, he wondered where his water will come from and if the animals would ever come back? Naked Napi had heard about the “black snake”; the iron snake with green skin who’s blood was black, that was making its way across the land, consuming everything in its path, he wondered if it was the snake that was eating all the animals?

Then Naked Napi heard that snake’s food was money, money that was being fed to it by the big corporations, these corporations had their own tricksters, political puppets who dance and sing the praises of the snake. Naked Napi now where the animals, the birds, the bugs, the trees, the land had gone, into the belly of the snake. Naked Napi remembered what had happened to his skin, the Bison, he remembered the big game hunters that came to clear the plains, to starve out the real people to steal the land, to rape the land and to make a profit from the land, Naked Napi the contrarian that he is, thought of an idea… time to go hunting!

Like the colonizers of the past, Naked Napi grabbed his big gun and began the search for the Big Game, the corporations, the political puppets, anything and anyone whom the snake had charmed. Naked Napi knew that the game had big mouths but little guns and set out to bag them, stuff them and mount them on the wall. Trophies for the flora and fauna, he hopes that his actions would bring the spirits of the animals, the birds, the bugs, the trees, and the land back.

Naked Napi is a continuum of the Blackfoot, storytelling, he is also referred to as “Old Man”, a cultural hero, trickster, troublemaker, foolish being yet also a benevolent being that shapes world view and life. Naked Napi Big Game Hunter is a new performance by Adrian Stimson that examines the Lakota prophecies of the “Black Snake”, the oil pipeline that is slithering across the land that will ultimately destroy the earth and everything on it.

 


CURATOR AND PROJECT INITIATOR

CLAUDE GOSSELIN, C.M. (c.v.)
Founder – General and Artistic Director
Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal
claude.gosselin@ciac.ca


ASSOCIATE CURATOR

ANDRÉ DUDEMAINE
Founder – Director of Cultural Activities
Festival Présence autochtone, Montreal


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