MUSICAL RESILIENCE IN SÁMI AND INDIGENOUS CANADIAN THEATRE, YEARBOOK FOR. TRADITIONAL MUSIC 2019 BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Phd Klisala Harrison papers: Sustainability and Indigenous Aesthetics:

In Gïeje, shifts in narrative phrasing reflect life experiences interpolating a joik performance. Jürgensen chose to reflect variability via new episodes that start from the insertion of something new into what is currently being performed. For example, Gïeje (as performed at the Riddu RiÀÀu festival in Norway in 2008) starts as five female characters enter a performance space. They dance as if finding a place to camp. After a male actor enters—a new stimulus—they immediately play with three-meter-long metal rods as if in a gigantic Japanese mikado game (Figure 6). The performance by includes many sudden shifts, which set it in a new direction, reflecting the improvisatory structure of joik. Jürgensen commented, (…)“If there is an interruption, big or small, everything can take a different direction and then you can go back to what you are doing”(…) (Jürgensen and Harrison 2016).

The Sámi did not historically have a dance. Jürgensen’s method created a line of flight (Parr 2012:149–151) for working in a new direction. Symbiosis also stretches how we might think about resilience mechanisms of music sustainability. Her approach sustains a modular component, detached from its original context (Titon 2019:181,183), but this is not a musical sound or product. Rather, this is an embodied Indigenous experience at the creative origins of producing musical expression, that then becomes the origin of dance. In Canada, the Native Performance Culture method of creating theatre also has musical embodiment at its core. In that these methods detach and diversify experiences at the roots of musical creation and performance, symbiosis and Native Performance Culture incorporate that strategy of resilience (ibid.). The two creative approaches share the resilience characteristics of modularity and diversification.