That’s a wrap: culture mixes and all night jams at Nunavut arts fest

We be jammin… artists from this year’s Alianait Arts Festival close out the four-day event at the after party, jamming well into the morning. (PHOTO BY HEATHER DALEY)

As workers roll away the iconic purple and yellow big-top tent outside Nakasuk Elementary School in Iqaluit, more than a hundred artists are probably catching up on sleep on the way home from another busy year at the Alianait Music Festival.

Sleep deprivation is a likely outcome from a frantic four-day festival schedule over the Canada Day long weekend where 104 individual artists in 56 separate acts graced multiple stages across Nunavut’s capital.

But it could also be self-inflicted. Alianait’s infamous wrap party, July 3 this year, went well into morning as a troupe of international artists gathered to play music, closing out Iqaluit’s Francophone Centre and then continuing to jam at a private residence.

Alianait executive director, Heather Daley, says the value of those jams pays dividends to young Nunavut artists, such as Rankin Inlet’s Kuuri Panika, who learn to perform outside their musical comfort zone.

“I don’t think he ever experienced anything like that in his life, and he was in his element at the after party, singing away,” said Daley, who will be stepping down from her position following the 2018 Alianait festival.

“Giving an emerging artist that taste… I love opening up that world to musicians.”

Ticket sales were down compared to previous festivals, Daley said, but it’s a trend she chalks up to exceptionally good weather, as well as competing Canada 150 festivities that may have led to event-burnout among Iqalungmiut.

And this year’s sales don’t detract from the growing status of Alianait as more than just a regional festival; demands keep increasing on the technical crew, whose members worked through the night setting up the festival stage prior to a pre-festival concert by Joel Plaskett and the Emergency.

Technical crews later worked overnight again, converting the stage for theatre for two performances of Kiviuq Returns by an all-Nunavut cast on the final day of the festival.

“It was all in this very tight timeframe,” Daley said, of the setup prior to the Plaskett concert.

That being said, travelling thousands of kilometers to perform isn’t without its glitches, and this year’s festival proved no exception.

Members of South Carolina’s “Gullah” soul-gospel band, Ranky Tanky, sat for nearly 48-hours in New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, when bad weather slowed departures to a crawl.

The delay caused festival organizers to move the band to a later concert, and even then some band members arrived in Iqaluit with only hours to spare, Daley said.

And with last month’s tragic tsunami still hanging over the heads of many Greenlandic artists who performed at the festival this year, impromptu calls for donations by Alianait organizers helped to raise about $400 for the victims.

Joel Plaskett also donated about $500 in proceeds from his merchandise table to the Qaggiavuut Society which, along with being involved with Kiviuq Returns, is also collecting money to build Nunavut’s first performing arts centre.

Alianait’s next concert, featuring award-winning throat singer and performer Tanya Tagaq, is scheduled for Sept. 30 at Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School.