Tanya Tagaq and Severn Cullis-Suzuki collaborate at Beyond Words

Expect a transformative experience as Tanya Tagaq and Severn Cullis-Suzuki collaborate at Beyond Words

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      Although 2014 Polaris Music Prize–winning singer Tanya Tagaq and evolutionary biologist Severn Cullis-Suzuki are still finalizing what they’ll be doing when they share a stage next week, they know one thing: their presentation will address both the head and the heart.

      “It sounds a little cheesy,” Tagaq admits, laughing over a crackly cellphone connection from somewhere in Manitoba. “But I’m very emotionally driven and I feel very passionate about things, whereas I feel that Severn is a little more focused and has a lot more facts that she can pull out that I can learn from, right? Severn is pretty much an expert on some things that I’m very passionate about, like the environment and the state of Canada and how we can find ways to make things a little better and reduce our impact on the environment. So I’m just really thrilled to be working with her.”

      The admiration is mutual, with both collaborators in agreement that Tagaq’s art will help the audience absorb Cullis-Suzuki’s science. The biologist, however, isn’t entirely happy that their presentation, part of the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts’ innovative Beyond Words lecture-and-performance series, won’t be scripted from start to finish.

      “I’m a bit terrified, to be honest,” says the Haida Gwaii resident, reached at her sister’s Vancouver home. “I’ve had a wonderful connection with Tanya, and she definitely put me at ease, but being on-stage with a powerful musical performer and having to do some improvisation or response to her music… Yeah, it’s not without a little trepidation that I’m moving forward. But I believe that we have a plan: I will begin speaking about the issues that I think face us as a human species, and they’re very much the issues that Tanya cares about and speaks to in a different way. And then we will gradually move into an interactive dialogue, and from there into her musicians and herself by the end. We’re hoping to use the power and the openness that listening to Tanya really promotes, while using some words and ideas to kind of steer or guide those emotions.”

      It’s a departure for both, but speaking out isn’t new to either woman. Cullis-Suzuki, the daughter of David Suzuki, has been a public figure since, at age 12, she delivered a gut-wrenching plea for environmental sanity at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. More recently, Tagaq has been in the news for displaying the names of Canada’s 1,200 missing or murdered aboriginal women during her astonishing Polaris awards performance, following her win for her 2014 album Animism, and then advising viewers to “wear and eat seal” during her acceptance speech.

      Perhaps surprisingly, the biologist and the singer share some views about the stomach as well. Food security is one of Cullis-Suzuki’s most pressing concerns, and she views both foraging and hunting as good ways for modern humans to reconnect with the land.

      “I live on Haida Gwaii, and a huge part of our summer is focused on food harvesting, the preservation of fish and meat and vegetables, and it’s incredibly powerful,” she says. “Being forced to do this, living in a small island nation, I’ve come to understand the deep connection to the land that you foster when you do these kinds of things, and how dependent we actually are on the Earth.”

      That’s a point not lost on Tagaq, who’s still tied to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that sustained her ancestors for thousands of years. “My favourite thing in the whole world is every summer I go up north and I spend three weeks getting as fat as I can off of arctic char,” she says. “That feels really good!”

      But Tagaq cautions that the beauty of an Arctic summer can mask the very real perils now endangering that traditional lifestyle. “To the naked eye, it looks like the most pristine and beautiful place in the world, but consider the fact that the Arctic Ocean is also the filtration system for the Atlantic,” she says. “We end up with a lot of PCBs and terrible chemicals in our breast milk and in the animals; it’s really only on the surface that it’s totally pristine. That’s why this is so urgent, because I want my kids and my kids’ kids to be able to drink water and not worry about it, to be at home and enjoy the land the way that all of our ancestors did.”

      Even more pressing, she adds, is that her children should be able to feel free from harm when they’re away from the relative security of the wilderness. On the national shame that is our government’s callous attitude towards the safety of aboriginal women, Tagaq is understandably blunt, making the brutal point that her daughter is four times more likely to be murdered than mine.

      “Somebody just needed to say it,” she explains. “You can go, ‘Yes, this person died and that person died,’ but anyone with a daughter would feel that and understand that you don’t want to be more afraid for the thing that’s the most special to you in your entire life. Of course, a lot of people like to say, with the missing and murdered indigenous women, that it’s all within our own communities, or that it’s all sex workers, but those are myths. There are sick people who are actually preying on indigenous women because they know that they can get away with it.

      “But we don’t need to live with that anymore,” she adds. “We don’t need to continue being unhappy with our government and unhappy with our lives. We can wake up if we want to. It’s right there.”

      If Tagaq’s Polaris performance was a ringing wake-up call for our nation, her appearance with Cullis-Suzuki is a chance to approach some pressing issues from a more intimate perspective. Tune in, and pay attention.

      Tanya Tagaq and Severn Cullis-Suzuki appear at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts next Thursday and Friday (October 16 and 17).

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