PuSh 2014: Nanook of the North/Tanya Tagak

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (19222) is perhaps the most famous, or infamous, documentary ever made. Technically, as one of the film's first intertitles boasts, it set a representational standard against which almost all non-fiction films since have been measured. Working with only a single camera and a skeleton crew in an unforgiving landscape, Flaherty captured some truly stunning shots. At the same time--the making of the igloo, for example--many of those shots were clearly staged. (Flaherty's camera was too big and too hot to get inside a completed igloo, and so the interior shots of Nanook and his sleeping family were taken within a three-sided structure.)

As an "ethnographic film," the work is even more controversial in its portrait of the primitive, yet "happy-go-lucky Eskimo" battling the elements. Nanook wasn't even the real name of the film's protagonist; nor was Nyla his actual wife. Moreover, the "frozen in time" ideology Flaherty conveys with his successive images of Inuit hunting traditions is, to say the least, a misprision. By the time Flaherty made the film, the Inuit were hunting with rifles rather than harpoons. And I daresay that a phonograph had likely made its way to the top of Hudson Bay by then.

So how to salvage--politically and aesthetically--such a controversial artifact of salvage ethnography? That's where the amazing throat singer Tanya Tagak comes in. Accompanied by violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin, Tagak creates a live soundscore to the film, literally breathing new life into it.

In the second of two PuSh Festival performances last night at the York Theatre on Commercial Drive, Tagak announced that she and her bandmates were in a good mood. That spirit of fun informed my reception of the performance that followed, which I read as neither an outright indictment of Flaherty's colonialist impulses (though Tagak does intone, in rhythmically propulsive blasts, the word "colonizer" in more than one scene) nor as a melancholic requiem for a lost way of life and lost generations of Indigenous peoples. Rather, in the spirit of the Idle No More movement (at whose heart, from the very beginning, have been music and dance), Tagak adopts a cheekily ironic pose that is at once defiant and dialectical. Wholly appropriate, then, that I couldn't stop shifting my gaze back and forth between Tagak and the film, a constant and conscious perceptual adjustment that forced me to re-calibrate, in the moment, my reading of each.

A powerful way to end this year's 10th anniversary festival.

P.

PuSh 2013: The Road Forward

Marie Clements rocked the house last night at Club PuSh with the premiere of The Road Forward, a multi-media blues-rock musical developed by Clements' and Michelle St. John's red diva projects, and featuring an original score by composer, musical director, and performer Jennifer Kreisberg--who together with St. John and fellow diva Cheri Maracle make up the work's girl power vocal soul. Originally created as a 9-minute piece for the closing performance of the Aboriginal Pavilion at the 2010 Winter Olympics, The Road Forward has since been expanded into a full-length evening that mixes traditional drum songs with Clements' and Kreisberg's newly commissioned set-list, and even a few adapted classics--including a rockin' version of "Lady Marmalade" on which St. John, Kreisberg, and Maracle all get to vocalize like there's no tomorrow.

As Clements tells us in the program, The Road Forward was conceived in response to her discovery, at the offices of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, of 40 years worth of archives from The Native Voice, a newspaper that chronicled and advocated for change in Aboriginal communities across the Americas from the 1930s to the 1970s, and about which Clements knew next to nothing. Archival images from the newspaper--many of them sourced and collected by my student Rachel Braeuer, who served as a research assistant on the project--are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage throughout the performance, and Clements and crew also make a direct link--in images and song--to the role that social media are currently playing in the Idle No More movement, with a live Twitter feed scrolling across a drum face downstage left.

It was a truly moving and galvanizing evening, one that needs to be repeated. I hope that The Road Forward returns (either to PuSh, or to another venue/festival) soon, and also that it tours. It deserves as wide an audience as possible. For the time being, I celebrate Clements' immensely generous vision and achievement, and the supporting roles that both my favourite performing arts organization and the Department of English at SFU (where Clements is currently writer in residence) played in bringing about last night.

P.