When you think about a show or a movie you saw a year ago, can you recall any that spurred you to take action?

Can you think of a piece of art that so moved you that it made you want to make a change, big or small in your life, in how you think, in how you move through the world?

It takes a skilled artist to make you feel many different emotions in the course of their piece, an even more talented artist to cause you to truly consider something from a new perspective.

But to move you to take action? That’s the highest tier of art.

Cliff Cardinal’s The Land Acknowledgement or as You Like It is raw, brimming with humour, brimming with well-earned rage, and implores (maybe even demands) audience members to move to action, to do something more.

It is a line to walk with pieces like this. Shame and blame are incredibly poor motivators to encourage changed behaviour, fact based reasoning tends to do little to attack deep rooted beliefs, and emotional appeals can be easily dismissed by “rational logic”. Cardinal is able to walk onstage with just himself, and keep us off balance for the whole show. It’s powerful, and simply done, but only a performer with Cardinal’s skills could pull it off.

The issue will always be if and when audiences are ready to engage with a piece like this. I can believe that this show, played to a different audience at a different time would not have landed well. It could have turned quickly. I can believe that there are people who saw the show tonight, shrugged and said “not for me”. I can believe there are more for whom this frankly, pissed them off.

There is value in feeling uncomfortable, there is a value in sitting with that discomfort, and assessing why we are uncomfortable – and yes, there is a lot of discomfort in this show.

But in pulling a whole audience together and inducing a visceral reaction with nothing but your words and your storytelling, with no sound cues, no visual aids, no props, truly, nothing but your words and make your case.

The power of the land acknowledgement is the Cardinal gives it all to us. His work was done when the final light snapped to black. He’s given us the information, the tools, the rhetoric, all the required pieces. What we choose to do as an audience member, is wholly in our laps. We can do nothing, we can listen, we can donate, or… we can do something else.

Let’s do something.