THEATRE Nigamon/Tunai **** The Studio until 18 August Step into The Studio at Potterrow this weekend, and you enter a space that is both utterly different from the urban landscape outside, and a perfect distillation of everything about our earth that makes it possible for us to exist here, as living creatures. There are living trees, pools of water, the sounds of the forest or rainforest, the occasional gleam of beautifully worked copper; and through this landscape move two human figures, Emilie Monnet of Canada and Waira Nina of Colombia. Both are artists, theatre-makers, and representatives of indigenous peoples, the Inga of the Colombian Amazon, and the Anishinaabe of the Canadian Great Lakes.
And over the last decade, they have worked together to create a show that is both ritual and protest, a beautiful 90 minute evocation of the profound spiritual and physical relationship with the earth that shapes the lives of indigenous peoples, combined with a hard-edged political argument about the multiple destructive forces that now threaten that way of life, and the life of the earth itself. Nigamon/Tunai - the words mean “song”, in both languages - is therefore an event that fits perfectly with this year’s Festival theme of “rituals that unite us”, while also offering a viscerally disturbing wake-up call, as we sit among the trees listening to soundscapes of the world’s forests crashing and burning to destruction, cleared for brutal forms of extractive mining or agriculture. The show owes its magnificent sensual impact to a superb creative team of more than 20 people, including sound designer Leonel Vasquez, lighting designer Chantal Labonte, and all the craftspeople who have helped create the exquisite setting.
Always at the centre, though, stand these two magnificent women, singing their grief or resilience, creating superb soundscapes with their own amplified voices, and arguing and praying for the lands they love and the generations to come; in a show that quietly says all that can be said about the global crisis we now face, and also, just possibly, begins to offer and some old and powerful tools for survival..
