Walk through an AMC Forum with theatres featuring two throat singers playing a game, hip-hop-laced spoken word, DJ Mad Eskimo playing with a collection of sounds on his mixing board and a beautiful sly-smiled woman sharing Inuk gossip with her audience.
For those who haven’t heard Taqralik Partridge perform yet, and for many who have, it isn’t easy to squeeze all of the elements of her style into a simple category. Labels are not what they seem and refuse to stay static for long. If you caught her at Casa Del Popolo for CKUT’s Words and Music recently, or earlier in February at Concordia, you’d be tempted to call her live performance spoken-word. You would be right and wrong.
Her experiments with gritty urban styles mix with traditional Inuit storytelling from her childhood in Northern Quebec. Lately she’s added DJ Mad Eskimo to the mix. An emerging artist in his own right, his improv of traditional, natural sounds and electronic beats are now accompanying Taqralik at live performances.
She reminds me of someone but I can’t put my finger on it yet . . .
As Taqralik becomes a fixture on CBC broadcasts and Montreal poetry face-offs, so far she has only performed her new tracks once back home, where she was surprised and pleased with the reaction. The questions about whether or not she is representing the Inuit voice are inevitable.
“To me, it’s just about being human . . .” she says. “I mean my roots are from there so it is often grounded in the Inuit experience. But it’s about the personal. People tend to think of the Inuit as either these savages or as these great, noble creatures. I like to write about the personal stuff that’s universal to everyone. Sometimes Inuits get into deep shit, just like everybody else.” Who is it she reminds me of . . .
She traveled with throat-singing partner Nina Segalowitz for more than 10 years across North America for festivals, TV and radio. A good way to think of Kattajjaq, the Nunavik-style of throat singing is to think of two women, probably standing facing each other, playing a game of repeating rhythms to each other, and creating harmonies by manipulating air from lungs to lips fated to end with laughter or two breathless women.
The Urban Inuk will be the first to tell you she is no longer a throat-singer although traces of it surface and disappear quickly into the rhythms of her current work. Her new role is curious observer of people she passes on Ste. Catherines St., of secrets from women she hasn’t met but knows well and of summers in Kuujjuaq or maybe modern-day tragedy.
A good example is a piece inspired by Charlie Adams, a popular Nunavik singer who recently ended up panhandling near Atwater metro. Charlie you sang for us/when we were kids/ So Charlie/ we’re paying you now.
She credits a hip-hop concert with k-os featuring spoken word artist Kamau for turning her onto the stage and mic as a solo artist. Her first gig was at Ottawa’s WestFest. Since then reviewers and bloggers have enjoyed trying to pinpoint her style.
Jim Bell writes in the Nunatsiaq News: “When (she) performs, you can never tell what you’ll hear next: an amusing satire perhaps, a delicate lyric, or a raucous barrage of high-speed lines, delivered straight from the gut.”
Words from the Westfest website announce her as “a lyric-addicted, melody-smitten artist with an omnivorous appetite for music and poetry. Her body of work often paints a street-level wordscape of the Montreal neighborhoods she so lovingly references . . . resulting in a refreshing and fascinating blend of the urban and the tundra.” Love that one!
Nordine Beason, known in spoken-word circles as The Storm wrote in her blog after the Urban Poetry Night in Ottawa: “Look out Toni Morrison . . . she is probably one of the few poets I have heard in North America to date who you could sit there and listen to . . . from dusk to dawn.”
Recently she was voted as one of The Mirror’s one to watch in 2007.
And then, it hits me and I know exactly who she reminds me of: Bjork Gudmonsdottir.
There are obvious comparisons. Throat singing plays a small role in current work. Bjork mixed some Canadian throat singing, not her own, in tracks from her last two albums.
The country child fights and embraces the urban woman, or a balancing-act between pure innocent and fearless female warrior. Both know how to work collaboration. Bjork currently with Timbaland and Taqralik with DJ Mad Eskimo. Both are currently experimenting with hip-hop and rap. Both command the stage but bring the audience close with a warm, gentle hand even when discussing suicide, trigger-fingers or obituaries. Both drop other languages into their English tracks. Both have ultra-cool MySpace pages.
Both women retreat to and run from memories of the North, without forgetting it gets dark up there.
And there are things only a fan can recognize. While articles and word-of-mouth try to staple labels on them, their multi-theatres of performance elements are constantly evolving and defy categories. Both paint vivid, complex interiors of the characters in their stories. Listen to Bjork’s Pagan Poetry. Listen to Taqralik’s My Mary Session or Randy. My favourite comparison is the mix, the balance, and the endless dualities between homeland and alien territory. For Bjork, that has proven to be Reykjavik vs. London, Thailand (remember the ass-kicking that reporter got!) and beyond.
For Taqralik, it’s the North and the South, and everything that includes. At her recent Concordia performance with DJ Mad Eskimo, she told the packed crowd, many of them sitting on the floor, she can still feel like an immigrant in the South and that alienation can apply to all of us.
The mosquitoes will come out with a vengeance/when the rain stops and the ever-waking sun shows itself once more/ and shows us rainbows/ that are here more beautiful perhaps than anything by falls in the Amazon/ or over corn stalks in some forgotten fields in the South/ The South/which to us is just an imaginary land anyway.
Then there’s the Urban Inuk sense of humour. Taqralik wrote in an article called ‘Southerners Are from Mars’ for UpNorth Magazine: “So much about Inuit culture is unpalatable to the world at large: animal skins, our food, our hunting.
Yet so many Inuit entities are parodied . . . First it was kayaks . . . now it’s ulus and inukshuks, which are becoming almost as ubiquitous as dream-catchers. Next thing you know, London cabbies will hang little stone men from their rearview mirrors.”
The future for Taqralik will bring more performances around Quebec. And also a debut CD she has been working on, and performances in Wales and Norway.
Tick, tick, tick/ and a thump, thump, thump . . . Eskimo Chick/ You are it.
