Tanya Tagaq, the extraordinary Inuit throat singer, will provide vocal accompaniment to a screening of the silent film Nanook of the North at Cincinnati’s Woodward Theater this weekend. Her unusual background and performance style need introductions.
Tagaq grew up in far northern Canada, at the small Arctic Archipelago town of Cambridge Bay in the largest and least-populated Canadian territory, Nunavut. Her town is on Victoria Island, one of the world’s largest.
The Inuit are indigenous residents, originating from the land where they continue to live. They used to be called Eskimo, a term that has fallen out of favor.
But while Tagaq very much identifies with those roots — her mother lived in an igloo until age 12 — her father was from Great Britain. After attending a residential high school at Yellowknife in the Northwest
Territories, she moved far away to study at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, where she fell in love with cutting-edge contemporary art forms.
As a result, her music is a singular mixture of the traditional and the avant-garde. The Contemporary Arts Center is the organization bringing her to town.
“I was born in the north, but then I went down to the university and art school,” Tagaq says by phone from her home in Cambridge Bay. “My mind was blown with the freedom of everything. I was in my late 20s when I started touring, and I would love going to contemporary art galleries. I just absorbed the contemporary art and the cultural climate and how people treated each other in different countries.”
Tagaq performs with a violinist, cellist and drummer whose approach combines Free Jazz and New Classical music. Her throat singing (Tagaq’s voice can produce a fundamental pitch and overtones simultaneously) is improvised; her shouts and moans are frequently accompanied with frenetic, dramatic body movements.
The Cincinnati show will not be too physically intense, she says, because she wants people to also watch the movie. But it will be different.
“To me improvisation is the closest thing to actual human existence, because no matter how much we try to control ourselves and our lives, the very essence of being alive is that we’re not in control,” she says. “I like the idea you can start making sounds and it can carry itself like a perpetual motion device. I feel like it has almost nothing to do with me during my performances.”
Though Tagaq is a Modernist, she also is a fierce defender and supporter of Inuit traditions. She is grateful for her upbringing in that environment.
“Nunavut itself is over 2 million square kilometers of land, with just 40,000 people spread all over it due to the harsh climate,” she says. “There are no trees, it goes down to minus 50 degrees Celsius, there’s ocean ice almost all year long and it’s completely isolated.
“I feel particularly lucky because I got to live in a place where the land owns me,” she continues. “I got to go around closer to the original state of life and humanity, as far as I’m concerned. I’m very lucky to have that perspective when it comes to my outlook about the rest of society.”
In Inuit culture, throat singing is done as a call-and-response duet, a friendly competition between two women who use it to practice mental acuity and lung capacity. Partly because it was looked upon with disdain by outsiders trying to westernize Inuit society, Tagaq doesn’t recall seeing it practiced much when she grew up. But when she was in college, her mother sent her traditional Inuit throat singing on a cassette tape that had the words “80s Hits” scratched out.
“I heard the tape when no one else was there with me, so I’d sing along because I loved it,” Tagaq says. “Soon I was making songs in the shower, then in the street, and it sort of snowballed. I didn’t set out to learn it — I had no intention of it going anywhere. It just happened naturally, like picking up a paintbrush and having a natural knowledge of paint somehow.”
Tagaq has received much acclaim, especially in Canada, for her new take on the traditional musical form. Her 2005 album Sinaa won several Juno Awards, including Best Female Artist, and her 2014 album Animism won Canada’s $30,000 Polaris Music Prize, beating out Arcade Fire and Drake. The album also won the Juno Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year and was nominated for Alternative Album of the Year.
Nanook of the North is a classic but controversial 1922 “documentary” by Robert Flaherty about Inuit life. It’s controversial because elements are staged and casted, but it’s classic because of the hardships involved in the filmmaking and its portrayal of a life little seen in the U.S.
The director spent 1914-1915 living with the Inuit in Canada. Flaherty’s initial footage was destroyed by a fire in his editing room, and he wasn’t able to get back to the area until 1920. He then collaborated with the Inuit people on the filmmaking (some were his camera crew). Much of what he showed was life as lived, but he also initiated rather than observed some elements. For instance, he included a sight gag — members of a family get out of a kayak as if departing a clown car — that raises ire now.
Tagaq acknowledges mixed feelings about the film, but says there is much to admire.
“I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, ‘It’s not like that, what the hell?’ ” she says. “There’s a lot of buffoonery in the film, like where everyone comes out of one kayak. It makes me so angry when everyone laughs at that. But I’ve been touring with it for almost four years and I’ve come to peace with it. And I do have a strong sense of pride when I see the film because it shows the landscape and shows some of the traditional life.
“Maybe when Flaherty first went up there his intent was to objectify people,” she adds. “(But) he ended up respecting people.”
TANYA TAGAQ performs Saturday at Woodward Theater. Tickets are available at contemporaryartscenter.org.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 3, 2016.