Tulugaq

Thank you to: Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre, The Theatre Centre and Kaneq Pictures for helping to support, welcome and document the company from Greenland to Turtle Island. Karitas Productions dance/theatre piece called Tulugaq is on tour across Canada.

On Wednesday August 17, 2011, Native Earth prepared to welcome with open arms our Kalaallit cousins with a hearty feast at Council Fire but because of communication problems, due to language barriers, they were nowhere to be found.  After about 45 mins, we were all united and feasted together trying to communicate and get to know each other. While we were cleaning up after the feast, the Tulugaq cast were excited to tell us that the feast was so inspiring and creative that they wanted to show us new work during their show the following night.

The Theatre Centre was generous enough to host Tulugaq and the show kicked off with the house being a little over half full. Tulugaq is a movement piece that has Kalaallit music serenading each movement piece. From my perspective it was a story of a love triangle that had a fourth character (the older sister whose partner was a part of the love triangle). The fight scene between the men and the dance of choice, where the lead woman chose which man she wanted, was a good performance and the language barrier was not a problem.

The extra pieces that the group worked on during the feast were a hip hop dance piece from Vilhelm Egede, a mask dance from the women (Arnatsiaq Reimer Eriksen and Najattaajaraq Jolesen) and some songs from Mike Thomsen. I found the mask piece to be similar to the clowning that was taught to me while I was at school and the audience responded well with a roar of laughter as the women kept flirting with some of the male audience members. It was fun to see the hip hop piece as it wasn’t really expected and the songs were beautiful. No one would have thought they would yodel like the polka, or at least that is not what I expected to come out of Mike’s mouth when he said that the next song was a traditional song of Greenland.

From the confusion of the feast to the wonderful movement story, the awesome hip hop, clowning mask dance and yodelling, our time with our cousins was full of fun and laughter and we will look forward to working with them in the future.

- Contributed by Shannon & Migizi Mishkiki