Split Tooth: Saputjiji | THEATER DER WELT

In the organizer's words:

Throat singing and dance, images from the Arctic: Tanya Tagaq sings of origin and myth. Bodies merge into an ecstatic, musical space of memory.

Tanya Tagaq comes from Nunavut in northern Canada. She is currently the most distinctive female voice of indigenous art in North America. And in the full sense of the word: she is a singer, a musician, a composer and an author. Her art can hardly be categorized. Each of her works has a unique character. As an artist and Inuk, she is committed to minority rights and equality. Her writing, albums and performances give millions of people a zest for life and self-confidence.
Tanya Tagaq opens the THEATER DER WELT festival in Chemnitz with a look into the abyss between destruction and salvation. She combines motifs from her autobiographical novel "Split Tooth", published in German under the title "Eisfuchs", with compositions from her current album "Saputjiji" to create a special literary-musical form.
The audience is whisked away to a small town on the edge of the Arctic Ocean above the Arctic Circle. Tanya Tagaq tells the story of an adolescent girl who is shaped by the overpowering nature and the disintegrating indigenous community. With poetic power, Tagaq describes how the child discovers her roots in the myths of the Inuit. Under the northern lights, the boundaries between man and nature, time and space become blurred, and a self-search begins that is able to heal old wounds.
Tagaq's latest album, "Saputjiji", is an eerily powerful encounter with this soulful landscape. Military codes, beats and electronic layering cut destructively through the scenes, are dismantled again, overlaid by throat singing, breath and silence. Saputjiji, a word for protector in Tagaq's mother tongue Inuktitut, appears as a savior.
Since contact with European colonial powers, the Inuit have been subjected to forced socialization and oppression and have only experienced constitutional equality since a change in the law in 1982.
Tanya Tagaq sifts through life with her voice, her body and her text like geological layers: digging, uncovering, full of resistance. Her throat singing is not a folkloristic quotation, but her contemporary practice. In collaboration with director Kaneza Schaal, the world premiere took place in February at this year's PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver.

Venue: Chemnitz Opera House
Introduction: 30 minutes before the start of each performance
Duration: 2 h 15 min
Information: In English with German surtitles

All further information at: https://www.theaterderwelt.de/programm/

A festival of the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute e.V.
Organized by Chemnitz Theatres, the Festival Academy Brussels and the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025 GmbH.

Price information:

Tickets at: theaterderwelt.de/split-tooth | 35% discount with festival pass. More information at: theaterderwelt.de/service/tickets