'She wants to do something important.'

Before she turns 17 next year, Pond Inlet's Abbie Ootova will be touring across Canada in a theatrical production she is helping develop with Toronto director Christopher Morris and fellow actors from both Toronto and Iceland.

"I really like acting," Ootova says. "When I was hanging out with my friends I was always acting, and they would laugh along with me."

She admits she would like to make a career of it.

Morris, who directed the young Inuk in her first production in Pond five years ago when she was still only 10, says Ootova "is the most talented person her age I've ever met. Her work ethic and skill as an actor are on par with all the professional actors she's working with."

"What I like most," he adds, "is that she is really driven and really cares." She doesn't want to do theatre that is just amusing. She wants to do something important."

The show, with "Night" as its working title, will open in Ottawa in January 2010, then tour through Yellowknife, Inuvik, Whitehorse and Toronto.

It will make its Nunavut debut at the June 2010 Alianait! Festival in Iqaluit, then return to Pond Inlet, where it all started, with a final appearance being arranged for Iceland.

Morris, whose theatre company Human Cargo "collaborates with international artists to create socially and politically pertinent theatre," was in Pond Inlet last month, leading the actors through a workshop process to develop the story and script.

The story revolves around the suicide of a young girl in the community, he says, and how it affects three different people.

Ootova plays Piuyuq Auqsaq, a young Inuk woman who, she describes as "a role model for other teens."

The character's struggle begins when her best friend commits suicide and she turns to drugs as she tries to come to terms with her traumatic loss.

She has to do battle with the devil inside her, says Ootova. But in the end, "she wins and the devil loses and her life comes back again."

It happens to a lot of people in places like Pond Inlet, she says.

"It's going to be a very powerful piece," Morris says. "It gets at a lot of important topics." Suicide is a huge issue in Nunavut.

Since each of the actors will bring a bit of themselves and their cultural context to the production, it might even seem that Ootova, Linnea Swan and Denni Palmarsson are being typecast.

Swan, an actor and dancer from Toronto, will play the white Torontonian who is attempting to bring back the skeleton of an Inuk man from Pond who died while in the south. The man was related to the character Ootova plays.

Palmarsson, the Icelandic actor, plays a documentary filmmaker.

The ways in which attempts by southerners to act with the best of intentions can go awry is the secondary theme of the play, says Morris, who has done socially relevant theatrical collaborations in Bosnia, the Republic of Georgia, South Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and will be going to Israel next month.

"Every time I work with actors from other cultures I learn something," he says.

The southern-northern relationship is complicated, Morris admits, because the colonial legacy is still a living dynamic, and an ongoing struggle being played out in Nunavut.

"It's challenging. It takes practice and time. But it's exciting."

The basic question, Morris says, is: "Do we have a social responsibility to one another in any manner – and what is that responsibility?"

Morris' relationship with Pond Inlet began five years ago when he decided he wanted to do a piece about life in the circumpolar world with Inuit and Icelandic and southerners. "I wanted to begin with how darkness affects people," so he picked Pond Inlet and went up for a visit.

He ended up putting together and directing a play with local actors, including the 10-year-old Ootova. And last year he worked with Pond actors again to adapt and direct the book, Saqiyuq, also performed at the Alianait festival.

This year's workshop is Morris's third one in Pond, working on this project with Inuk, Icelandic and southern Canadian actors.

The project is funded by the Nunavut Department of Culture, Languages, Elders and Youth, and by First Air and the Pond Inlet co-op.