Stephanie Nolen, 15/01/08 at 7:15 AM EDT
The hottest ticket in the Malian capital, Bamako, today, involves the Inuit. As part of the Artcirq trip to the country, the Canadian embassy has organized free screenings in neighbourhoods all over the city of Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner. The film is the best-known work by Zacharias Kunuk's Igloolik Isuma Productions, with which the circus troupe collaborates. The film is playing to packed houses in low-income neighbourhoods with the help of the local cinema ambulant. (But local sensibilities must be respected: the lengthy scenes where the title character runs naked through the tundra must be censored. Thus an audience member is assigned to stand and hold a piece of paper over Atanarjuat's naughty bits – there have been a few alarming moments when the paper has been lowered a little too early, causing considerable consternation.)
Today, after meeting the local press, the Artcirq group set out to do some sight-seeing. They plunged into the choked streets of Bamako's Grand Marché, where one can buy everything from papayas to teapots to lingerie. Energized by the bustle, they put on a spontaneous display of acrobatics – to the delight of vendors and shoppers, who responded by showering them with small gifts.
Artcirq is scheduled to perform their stage show at the French Cultural Centre on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. They are also slated to perform at a large public school here in Bamako on Wednesday – but as word has spread about these unlikely stars, the phone is ringing off the hook at the embassy with other schools also pleading for a visit.
Under the heading "Your tax dollars at work," it bears noting that the Canada Council for the Arts helped Artcirq get here and that the Canadian embassy in Mali has done an extraordinary job organizing their visit. The deputy director of cooperation (which is what they call foreign aid these days) Darquis Gagné, who is supremely efficient and unfailingly cheerful, is himself a veteran of years of work in the Canadian north. He accompanied the group to Essakane and helped with everything from sourcing crates of bottled water to arranging homesick phone calls back to Igloolik. The embassy has also arranged for the screenings of the Kunuk film and the Artcirq performances here in Bamako, and is handling the myriad logistical challenges with great grace.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has a large aid program – $69 million in 2004-05 – in Mali, which is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. Canadian funds support everything from the creation of rice farmers' unions to textbooks for primary schools to better tax collection. But the Artcirq group, a motley collection of shy but talented Inuit young people, provides a very different image of the country than Malians typically see – and this visit is fast proving to be a minor public relations triumph for Canada.
Stephanie Nolen, 14/01/08 at 6:45 AM EDT
And then the sun came up, and it was over. By the time the Inuit artists poked their heads out of their low Tuareg tents, just before 8 o’clock on Sunday morning, most signs of the festival had vanished, evaporated like spilled water on the sand.
All the tents around theirs had already been pulled down and packed away. Tuareg were loading their last bundles on to protesting camels. The fluttering silk banners were gone from the main stage; the disco ball and speakers from the DJ stage were gone, too. Where the day before there was at least 8,000 people, now there were only a few hundred.
And Mali’s poverty was suddenly starkly evident: women were scavenging for the empty plastic bottles casually tossed aside by tourists, which they will use for transporting water from oasis wells; little children were poking through the heaps of rubbish for scraps of food; and old women were breaking up the sticks used as tent pegs, to burn in cooking fires.
There was just time for breakfast before the group loaded back into Land Cruisers and headed for the airport three hours’ drive away in Timbuktu. Jacky Qrunngnut marvelled at the meal he bought from one of the rough food stalls. "I never thought I’d get an omelet in the Sahara," he said. Indeed, there was not a chicken for a day’s travel in any direction.
Leaving Essakane, the group had truck trouble. While they waited out the repairs in the meagre shade of a thorn tree, Tuareg zipped past on camels, far more efficient in the sand.
By this point, the Artcirq group was scarcely recognizable as the same one that came into the desert four days before. Many members had adopted Tuareg-style turbans. Everyone had bought traditional silver jewellery; many had swapped accessories from home with bands from other corners of West Africa. Solomon Uyarasuk was wrapped in a bright, print Dogon tunic.
"The best thing about this was being in nature," said throatsinger Sylvia Cloutier. "Like home, but in such a different way."
The group flew back to Bamako in the afternoon, anxious to get to plumbing and Internet access. They perform on Tuesday night at a cultural centre here.
The Artcirq group brought ice
– well, water by now – from a lake near Igloolik as a gift for the Tuareg, thinking water was a symbolic thing to bring a desert people. In exchange, they’re taking home the sand of the Sahara – in their shoes, clothes, instruments, ears ….
Stephanie Nolen, 13/01/08 at 11:29 PM EDT
Slowly, one by one, I could see people begin to figure it out: that sound. That noise. That music. It’s coming from those women. They’re singing. Or something. When the Igloolik-based troupe Artcirq took the stage in the early hours of this morning at the Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu, much of their act was mystifying, and much had the audience
– made up largely of nomadic desert dwellers – thoroughly charmed. But it was the kattadjak, the throatsinging, and especially an extraordinary solo by shy, elfin Celina Kalluk, 29, that really mesmerized the crowd.
"But how does she do that!" sputtered the Malian next to me, as the eerie rhythmic groaning that imitates the wind and the rivers poured over the sand dunes from a high concrete stage at the edge of the oasis.
The festival was running hours late and it was thoroughly cold and windy by the time the Inuit performs took the stage; the air was thick with the smoke of a hundred small charcoal fires. Artcirq’s members sang, juggled, flipped, tumbled, hefted each other in the air, and acted out traditional stories. They draw on feats from the traditional Inuit games; they accompanied much of it with bluesy bass guitar riffs. The crowd-pleaser highlights included a hunting story, acted out with Jacky Qrunngnut, 22, clad in the skin of a polar bear (one they shot two years ago when it came after them while they were caribou hunting), a skit which degenerated into a skillfully acted slapstick that had the crowd roaring. The Tuareg also gasped appreciatively at a kicking contest, won by Jimmy Awa Qamukaq, 19, who leapt from a squat to kick what appeared to be an Arctic char dangling about 9 feet up from a pole.
Many of the young men performed part of the show shirtless, which sometimes seemed to be garnering more attention than their feats of juggling or balancing. "Aren’t they cold?" well-bundled Tuareg seated around me kept asking. I tried to explain that it’s pretty cold where these folks come from, so they’re used to it. "But not as cold as this, surely," they said, huddling together against the chill of the desert night, while the temperature dipped near zero. I could not persuade them otherwise.
Terence Uyarak explained to the crowd that they were performing at nearly the same moment that people back home in Igloolik were celebrating the annual feast at the return of the sun, after months of polar winter dark. But again, no one in this sun-bleached patch of the world could seem to take in the idea that there is a place where the sun doesn’t shine, at all, for months at a time.
The show was not without hitches
– the performance space was not the sort the troupe usually uses, and the festival’s lights-and-sound technical specs could best be described as "on the fly." And much of what they did was simply lost on this crowd: the show opened with video footage of the members tromping in parkas against a dark Arctic sky, with just the sound of the snow scrunching under their boots, and it had the audience befuddled. The keen Inuit sense of the absurd that underlies much of the clowning in the show also seemed to be lost on the Euro-and-Malian audience. A heartfelt poem by Solomon Uyarasuk about suicide, which may make a lot of sense when the troupe performs in the Arctic, was bizarrely out of context in the middle of the act here. And many of the Tuareg women, wrapped in dark veils with their faces tattooed with indigo, seemed to find the raw earthiness of the throat singing discomfiting, even disturbing, and turned their faces away from the stage, muttering, when the women sang.
Festival organizers, unfortunately, did nothing to provide the audience with context for who the performers were or what cultural traditions their act draws on. The sole bit of information the master of ceremonies provided was to tell the crowd, repeatedly, that Artcirq changed planes seven times to be here
– which mostly made it sound like they had a really bad travel agent.
And yet in Artcirq’s group performances
– with some of the young men playing instruments at the back of the stage, some juggling and clowning, some pounding on a qilaut drum, and Ms. Kalluk and Sylvia Cloutier throatsinging – there were obvious echoes of the traditional Tuareg, Dogon and other West African culture whose musicians have performed here, and it was easy to see why festival organizers were keen to unite the two disparate cultures.
Stephanie Nolen, 10/01/08 at 5:10 PM EDT
There's no down-in-front with a camel, really.
The 8th Festival in the Desert began a couple of hours ago, with several thousand people sitting and standing in the cool, white sand at the edge of the oasis at Essekane. The sun set just as the event kicked off, silhouetting robed men, veiled women and camels on all the surrounding ridges. On the small, raised stage there were speeches by notables including the local governor and Mali's Minister of Culture.
Then the music began, with the opening provided by Tamnana, a traditional ensemble of men and women from Essekane who drum, chant, clap and ululate. They're a big hit with the locals, and it turns out that demonstrations of musical appreciation hereabouts take the form of camel tricks. When the spirit moves them, nomads on camelback suddenly charge down from the dunes to the front of the stage, where they coax their camels down to "walk" on their front knees
– a much-admired feat. Or they dismount and launch sudden sword fights with phantom opponents, before swinging back up and charging the camel back and forth in front of the stage a few times. It's the Tuareg version of the mosh pit, and it's magical to watch, but it does tend to blot out the action on the stage.
There are now an estimated 10,000 people gathered on this patch of sand at the edge of the Sahara; they poured in all day long. White tents made of thick cotton have sprung up as far as the eye can see in all directions
– artists and tourists and reporters and dignitaries at the centre near the stage, with the Tuareg who are coming from all corners of the desert choosing to remain further out.
There was an extraordinary parade of camels in mid-afternoon
– the camel racing starts tomorrow, so the beasts had to be registered, which was a good excuse to show them off. Every camel rider names his beast – emerging from my tent, I was nearly stomped on by one whose name means, in English, "She always wants to eat."
The camels are decked out in intricately tooled leather harnesses, and high-backed saddles, in which their riders lounge, looking for all the world like they are on loping armchairs. The perpetually-hungry camel's rider told me she frequently goes 15 days without drinking, when they are on long trading trips in the desert; the next camel-driver over sneered a little at this and told me that his beast has gone three months without a drink, on occasions. I have no idea if this can be true, or if it's like young Canadian men boasting about the speed of their cars.
The Canadian delegation, the troupe Artcirq from Igloolik, was meant to screen a film tonight
– Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner, by Zacharias Kunuk. He was supposed to be part of the delegation, in fact. But in Igloolik, they are about to celebrate the annual event of the Return of the Sun, after the worst of the Arctic winter, celebrations of which he is in charge, and so he was obliged to decline the invitation to the desert. Instead, the troupe brought the film and projection equipment, and hoped to show it on the side of a dune – but everything got underway a few hours late (that's a recurring theme here) after the trucks bringing the sound equipment got mired in the sand (that's another recurring theme.) Maybe tomorrow.
Music is set to go on at the main stage until 2 o'clock this morning, while the informal jam sessions (which a couple of hours ago saw some of the Inuit musicians playing with the reggae troupe from Ivory Coast who live in the tent next to them) go on around small fires all night long.
And as if the whole event were not wacky enough, Vogue magazine's U.S. edition has decided that this is the perfect setting for a fashion photo shoot, and dispatched a peripatetic Swedish photographer, three assistants, two stylists and a model into Essekane.
Whatever it is we're all meant to be wearing for spring, you can be sure it will feature camels.
Stephanie Nolen, 09/01/08 at 4:50 PM EDT
As the Land Cruiser chundered out of Timbuktu and into the soft, fine sand of the Sahara, Sylvie Cloutier threw her head back and whooped. "Can I drive?" she asked the driver in French. "I'm used to this!" He arched one an impassive eyebrow.
Turning to her fellow Inuit artists, behind her in the car, she said, "It's just like a snowmobile, right, guys?"
Over the next three hours, the wheezing vehicle plunged and plowed through the sand, and they had a lot of time to talk about how this is
– and isn't – just like their Arctic home.
A snowmobile, Jacky Qrunngnut observed, will "drive itself" if you put it in the tracks, whereas the sand takes constant negotiation. Navigating in this, though
– in land that's called "empty", just like home – is similar to home: it's only vast and empty for those who don't know it, aren't from it.
For the first couple of hours, the landscape was dotted with small, scrubby thorn trees
– that's a difference, because there are no trees at all back in Igloolik. Then the trees faded away and there started to be more people – well, a few anyway – Tuareg nomads who suddenly appeared on the horizon, herding bony cows or riding camels. There's no word for camel in Inuktitut, you may not be surprised to learn, although there is a word for sand, and one for what it feels like to be very hot.
Hot, however, is the subject of some discussion in Mali right now. The country, as any Malian will tell you, is having an unprecedented cold snap. It was just 14 degrees this morning in Timbuktu. When I headed into the street with my toddler son, who was wearing only a light sweater, a group of local women berated me for taking the child outside in such a climate. But the Artcirq members are finding it sufficiently hot that several of the acrobats stripped their shirts off when we stopped in a traditional tented restaurant for lunch. Ms. Cloutier checked her email in Timbuktu (yes, the end of the world has internet cafes). "It's -59 at home today," she said, sweat beading on her forehead. "This is all a little hard to believe."
After hours in the sand, the Land Cruiser slowed down, and a couple of small buildings appeared in the dust. One had an electric light bulb. And that was the sign: we were here. There is a scattering of white, Tuareg tents, a stage on the crest of the dunes, some soldiers guarding the perimeter, a portable mobile-phone tower, and a strange mix of sunburned foreigners and curious, turbaned nomads.
The sun sank not long after six o'clock, and suddenly it was cold indeed
– the temperature will likely fall below zero tonight. The festival doesn't start until tomorrow, but from one row of tents there is the sound of that distinctive Malian steel-guitar blues. And from the other direction, the rumbling complaints of tethered camels.
Stephanie Nolen, 09/01/08 at 4:40 PM EDT
On the tarmac in Timbuktu, the Inuit acrobats in their Metallica t-shirts and skater pants are lovingly embraced by Tuareg tribesmen in brilliant blue turbans and robes. It's all a little weird, and it's only 8 o'clock in the morning.
Two throat singers and the seven acrobats and a technician of ArtCirq
just touched down in this ancient city on their way to the Festival au Desert.
The group checked in for the flight here
– chartered by the Malian Ministry of Culture – while it was still dark and chilly in the capital, Bamako. Acrobat Jimmy Qamukaq watched as men in bright print boubou and women in veils, plus the odd over-accessorized European tourist, bustle around him. "Does this all seem a little weird?" I asked him. Just a couple of days ago, he was home in Igloolik, where it was -50 C.
"Not weird," Jimmy said seriously. "Not weird. Just a different experience."
The Inuit group left Igloolik on January 2nd. They flew to Iqauliat, Montreal, Casa Blanca and Bamako. From here, it's into a collection of ancient Land Rovers, and out into the desert
– 70 km to the oasis at Essekane, and the world's most inaccessible and alluring arts festival.
"It's been a long journey," said Terry Uyarak. "But I'm so excited. It gets more exciting all the time."
