Avant-garde throat-singing comes home to Arctic?

Trio hopes to bring show to Nunavut, Nunavik

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

After wowing crowds in Europe, three young Inuit throat-singers need Nunavut and Nunavik’s tiny communities to make their next dream into a reality.
Sylvia Cloutier, a performing artist based in Iqaluit, and two fellow throat-singers from Nunavik are riding high since they returned from a month of rehearsing and touring with a critically acclaimed Belgian group, Think of One.

Although the tour just finished, Cloutier and her co-singers, Akinisie Sivuarapik and Sarah Surusila, of Puvirnituq, already have their next goal in mind. They want to share their musical creation with family, friends, and supporters living in the land where they came from.

However, Cloutier said, putting their funky musical experiment on stage in the Canadian Arctic will depend on community support and funding.

“We kept thinking all along the way ‘we’re so lucky to be out in the world doing this’,” Cloutier said during an interview in an Iqaluit café.

“We want to bring this show home.”

Cloutier said the communities would get more than their money’s worth by supporting the project.

The throat-singing trio formed a strong bond during their two weeks on the road, performing traditional throatsinging songs from Nunavik, woven in with punchy, experimental funk music.

Although they hadn’t previously performed together, Cloutier said their performances were tight: Sivuarapik often seized a guttural rhythm, Surusila pierced the high notes, and Cloutier sang harmony. Cloutier’s younger partners “sounded like elders with young voices,” she said.

The award-winning members of Think of One joined in with their guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, and wrote a series of songs that defy any genre, besides the broad “world music.”

Cloutier prefers to describe the experimental songwriting as simply “beautiful.”

But despite the genre-bending results, Cloutier insisted they didn’t change one note of their elders’ traditions.

“Obviously, experimenting on traditions is a sensitive issue,” she said. “I don’t feel we’re changing the traditions at all.

“We’re just trying to express them in our own way.”

Cloutier learned throat-singing three years ago from a group of elders in Puvirnituq, including her singing partner’s mother Mary Sivuarapik, Alacie Tulaugak, Nellie Nungak, and Lucy Amaroalik.

Cloutier, 28, said she and her slightly younger co-singers worry and wonder at how their teachers and elders will view their avante-garde projects with other musical styles.

Although she doesn’t apologize for branching out, Cloutier said she understands the resistance to experiments with Inuit traditions.

“We as Inuit have had to adapt so rapidly,” she said. “It’s a natural instinct to say ‘if I don’t have to change, I don’t want to.’”

But Cloutier’s readiness to try new projects is paying off. Her past performances at the Arctic Winter Games in Iqaluit in 2002 inspired the keyboardist from Think of One to invite her on the recent tour, which turned out to be a first-of-its-kind for Europe.

The Belgian band set up a travelling festival called Étoiles Polaires, which brought together a variety of dancers, actors, and artists from around the circumpolar world, including the fast-rising star from Nunavik, Elisapee Isaac, and her group Taima. The groups performed in Canada, Greenland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Only days after finishing the European tour, Cloutier’s full-time work in throat-singing and other Inuit arts landed her a gig in Argentina this month, performing at a United Nations meeting on climate change.

But Cloutier’s questioning how much longer she can stay in Iqaluit as a full-time artist. She says the cost of living is too high for someone who doesn’t have a government job and associated housing.

She’s considering making Europe a new, temporary home, even for a year, especially in light of the recent tour’s success.

Whatever her choice, Cloutier feels she has many projects left to do, including new recordings and a tour to team up with Alaska’s favourites, Pamyua.

She said all she needs is an audience that appreciates something new.

“Performing is such a healthy way of getting attention, even in an unhealthy place,” she said. “When you work so hard at something, you want to share it with someone.”

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