Nanook of the North, As You’ve Never Seen (Or Heard) It Before

LifeinQuebec.com reviewer Mark Lindenberg went along to the Tanya Tagaq concert at the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City.

This is how he saw it:

As usual, I’m behind the culture curve. I had, of course, heard of Tanya Tagaq by the time of her 2014 Polaris Music Prize win, for the Animism album. I had heard traditional throat-singing, performed by two women, and that Tagaq had adapted it for solo performance.

But I hadn’t heard Tagaq sing. Nor had I ever seen Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 docu-drama about Inuit life.

Probably a good thing on both counts, in this case. Tagaq’s performance on February 18, at Québec City’s Palais Montcalm, didn’t lend itself to pre-conceptions. She and her fellow musicians, a violinist, drummer, and guitarist, gave what’s been called “the first documentary” an entirely new soundtrack.

Flaherty’s work is a difficult piece: it includes aspects of truth and reality, an outsider’s misinterpretation and embellishment, as well as the usual distortions typical of film – all combining to make an engaging, but inaccurate, portrait.

Before she begins, Tagaq speaks to us quietly, with humour and honesty, asking us not to take pictures, partly because she is dressed in a black cat-suit (for this performance only or for a series, she doesn’t say). Researchers at Laval want to discover whether there is a correlation between the sounds she makes and her movements, on-stage. The other reason no recording is allowed? She asks us to experience her performance, rather than record it.

So we are in that moment, together. Her experience of it becomes ours, as much as possible.

By making her own soundtrack, juxtaposing her art and emotion with Flaherty’s film, Tagaq and her stage companions take the unreal (Nanook biting into a gramophone record, a naive savage), fuse it with feeling – keening wail, throaty growl, murmuring whisper, pound of the drum, thrum of the guitar, lament of the violin. She gives it to the audience in what she wittily calls “a modern human” context.

Watching her on-stage gyrations, hearing the sounds of her voice, and combining those with Flaherty’s images and text in my head, I see Tagaq take the stereotypes (the happy Eskimo), the staged elements (the hunt) and the real (the biting cold), and manipulate the white man’s manipulation of her culture. She takes it back for herself, and gives us something more complete than Flaherty’s “frozen wastes” and “happy-go-lucky Eskimo.”

What sticks with me, the morning after? Tagaq’s empathy for animals: the howls of fear she gave the hunted, their rage at being caught, their desire to escape. The guttural snarl of two sled dogs fighting. The quiet moments, too: Nanook and his family bedding down for the night, or getting up in the morning, children clambering all over the place, things that all of us can relate to. An aurally odd moment that suddenly seems perfectly natural: An igloo being built to the sounds of stress, strain and pain. Could it have been done without?

And the ending? Too good for spoilers. Result: I can’t imagine what this film was, without Tagaq’s own soundtrack.

Nor would I want to.

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