She opens her throat and The North comes out

By: Alison Mayes Posted: 1:00 AM CST Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010

Four years ago, Andrew Balfour, artistic director of the Camerata Nova vocal ensemble, needed a last-minute replacement for an Inuit throat singer.

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Four years ago, Andrew Balfour, artistic director of the Camerata Nova vocal ensemble, needed a last-minute replacement for an Inuit throat singer.

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Four years ago, Andrew Balfour, artistic director of the Camerata Nova vocal ensemble, needed a last-minute replacement for an Inuit throat singer.

In a panic, he called the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) to ask whether staff there had any suggestions.

That’s how APTN host and accomplished singer-songwriter Madeleine Allakariallak found herself drafted for the première of Balfour’s Northern Lights-themed oratorio, Wa Wa Tey Wak.

“I think the stars brought me and Andrew to meet,” says Allakariallak, 34, by phone from her home in Iqaluit, where she has returned after living in Winnipeg for two years as an APTN personality.

The singer, who has performed in South Africa, Japan and Europe as well as across North America, remembers being amazed at the sound quality in the corkscrew-shaped Precious Blood Church in St. Boniface, where Wa Wa Tey Wak was performed.

“I was like, ‘Was that me?’ The acoustics are amazing.”

This weekend, Allakariallak and Balfour, who is of Cree heritage, are back at the same church for two performances of a Camerata Nova concert called Medieval Inuit.

Guest-conducted by Mel Braun, the concert features Allakariallak and fellow singer Sylvia Cloutier performing traditional Inuit songs and throat singing; medieval music coinciding with the time when Europeans and Inuit first met; early Scandinavian and Icelandic songs; arrangements of Inuit songs by Balfour; and a major new, culture-blending choral work by Balfour called Medieval Inuit.

Last summer, Allakariallak, her husband and four children played host to Balfour in Nunavut, where he found great inspiration for the composition.

“We took him out camping and boating and fishing,” she says.

Allakariallak grew up in remote Resolute Bay and learned to sing from elders, particularly her grandmother, who had lived on the land until the 1950s. Although there are different styles of throat singing in different regions, she says, the style she learned doesn’t use words. Often guttural-sounding, it mimics sounds from nature — particularly animals and birds — and is done by a pair of women in friendly competition. Each tries to outlast the other.

“Traditionally, women throat-sang as a way of entertaining each other while their men were out hunting. It was a game. One creates a sound and the other follows, and creates the exact same sound. The sounds overlap… Whoever starts laughing first, loses.

“When you close your eyes as an audience member, you actually start to hear sounds: the mosquito, the water passing through rocks in the river.”

A centuries-old, funny nonsense song handed down through the oral tradition ties in perfectly with Balfour’s theme of first contact between Inuit and Europeans.

In it, “a man is trying to speak like the people who came off the ship, in their language,” Allakariallak says. “It doesn’t make sense in any language. I think it goes back to when the whalers began to come to the communities.”

The singer says she’s very fortunate to be getting time off from her job to perform in Winnipeg. She is the executive assistant to Eva Aariak, premier of Nunavut, and the legislature is sitting this month.

“(The premier) thinks music is very important,” says Allakariallak. “When I’m on duty, travelling with her, she tries to get me to sing.”

Medieval Inuit, at Precious Blood Church (200 Kenny St.), Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets $22 (seniors $20, students $10) at 918-4547, www.cameratanova.com, McNally Robinson or at the door.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca