With the revelations of the past few years, it’s long past time for Canadians to take an extra step toward learning about and understanding Indigenous peoples and their cultures.
Even as we strive toward reconciliation, there is still much work that needs to be done. This includes addressing how Indigenous people residing in the North, such as the Inuit, are often sensationalized and incorrectly portrayed by the media. That’s why it is necessary for us to take the time to truly get to know the culture and understand the daily lives of modern Inuit people.
This is the message that Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ aims to convey.
Photo: Anne-Marie Baribeau.
Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ—which means “being silent so you can hear something beautiful” in Inuktitut—takes place in the northern village of Nunavik, where two friends, Nancy and Ulivia, live together in a cabin. As a radio documentary plays in the background, they are joined by other Inuit women as they bare their hearts to the audience about their hopes, dreams, and experiences living in the North.
“It’s really basically a dive into the world to the North, into their daily lives in the North and into their vision of the world as young women,” says Laurence Dauphinais, the director of Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ. “It’s a very multimedia show with spatialized sound, beautiful images from the North, as well as […] a facade of the house.”
Presented by the NAC Indigenous Theatre in collaboration with the NAC French Theatre, Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ is a hybrid performance that incorporates elements of radio documentary and theatre. The radio element is especially important, as it represents a vital means of communication for Northern communities—in more ways than one.
“It’s the main media of communication, because a lot of people in the North are not connected to the Internet,” says Dauphinais. “It also is a media that the communities have used to reclaim their language and their culture.”
Playing from October 26-29 in the Azrieli Studio, Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ is performed not only in English and French, but also in Inuktitut (with English and French subtitles provided).
Photo: Anne-Marie Baribeau.
As the audience slowly becomes immersed in the Northern soundscape and hears the stories of these Inuit women, they also find themselves diving deeper into the perspectives and realities of the Inuit people as a whole. In other words, they’re given the chance to truly understand what Inuit culture and living in the North is really all about.
“We want to force people to feel a kind of displacement and unfamiliarity that they need to learn to live with and adjust to,” says Dauphinais. “If they keep investing in it, if they are patient, and if they’re curious, they will then gain access to this incredibly rich and beautiful culture.”
However, for people to fully benefit from this experience, it will require hard work and patience from everyone involved.
“Both parties need to invest, need to engage, need to open up, need to actively want to meet. And that is the experience we’re offering,” says Dauphinais.
While forming a connection by talking is indeed important, Dauphinais says it is also essential for people to listen to one another.
“We speak all the time. We’re not very good at listening anymore,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the same up North. Silence has a very different kind of role to play in society and us, as people from the South who use language in such a different way, we have to learn to listen to those people who don’t use language the same way as we do, who also had their language [and stories] taken away from them by colonization.”
Photo: Anne-Marie Baribeau.
When Dauphinais first started directing this project alongside her co-creator Marie-Laurence Rancourt, they not only sought to expand their knowledge and understanding of people in the North. They also wanted to ensure that the development of Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ was done in such a way that everyone involved benefitted equally from it.
“When we entered this project, it was extremely important for us to create a collective where people could feel like we were all on an equal setting,” says Dauphinais. “That we were all collaborators. That we could find a way to work together, to feel heard, to feel respected, to find a new way of creating that would be respectful of people’s capacity and way of life.”
Despite having experienced quite a few challenges while directing Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ, Dauphinais says that in the end, the experience proved to be one of the most gratifying and enlightening experiences of her life.
“I think that more projects like that, that redefine our way of creating, redefine our way of encountering and of being as a society is very important.”
Aalaapi | ᐋᓛᐱ runs from October 26-29 in the Azrieli Studio at the National Arts Centre, 1 Elgin St. Thanks to the NAC’s Under30 and All My Relations programs, tickets, normally $36 each, are available at $15 for people under 30 years old and members of the Indigenous community. For more details and showtimes, check out the National Arts Centre’s event page here.
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