On stage, Tanya Tagaq is in turn the ogre and the child, the wolf and the prey, the polar bear and the snow goose, the wailing child and the screaming mother, the laughter and the cry, the life And the dead. This throat singing performance, inspired by traditional Inuit singing, occurs throughout the film. sound hunter, that the Inuit artist made with Chelsea McMullan. From the first minutes, we enter the haunting universe of throat singing, where two women respond to each other, expressing the most varied emotional states, almost sucking each other in.
Traditionally, throat singing is practiced in this way, by two women who call and answer each other. But Tanya Tagaq has adapted the practice to her hand, and it is alone, surrounded by musicians, that she gives herself up body and soul. This music, she also says, is born in the great territory of the North, in its immense spaces, where she takes us with her family, where we had to fight to survive, where nature provided entirely for the needs of his ancestors. It is on this earth that she says she wants to be deposited at her death, when the ice will slow down the slow decomposition of her body. Perhaps, more than anywhere else, one feels, in this arid territory, the loneliness and stealth of life. To tame these lands, it takes time and science.
Tanya Tagaq agreed to participate in this documentary, whereas she usually refuses, on the condition that we meet her mother, who is part of the group of Inuits who were deported by the Government of Canada to Resolute Bay to ensure the occupation of Canadian territory. After a month of traveling by boat, they were left on an inhospitable land they did not know, where they almost starved to death.
We see her mother, therefore, but also the children of Tanya, with whom she runs in the tundra, discovering the bones of fish that the birds have left there. In the Far North, she says, spring has the smell of the previous autumn, rocks like lichens give off specific, precise smells. As if the earth, the nunaand the body were one, we also visit the wounds of the singer, her body deflowered too soon, cut in two, broken, in front of this omnipresent drawing of the woman giving birth to the earth.
Several of the texts read by Tanya Tagaq in the film are taken from her novel split fang, translated into French by Alto. An accomplished, avant-garde and intense artist, she lets us step into her universe. It’s up to us to discover the codes along the way.