NIGAMON/TUNAI at the Edinburgh International Festival

★★★★

“We emerge from the experience wiser and somehow purified of the noise and bustle of the world outside the performance space”

Nigamon/Tunai, brought to the Edinburgh International Festival by Onishka Productions, is a joint collaboration between artists and water protectors from indigenous peoples in North and South America. Artists Émilie Monnet and Waira Nina present a show that features water, plant life, and sounds and sights created by humans using musical instruments and art objects made specially for the show. Nigamon/Tunai illuminates the struggle that indigenous peoples of the Americas are currently engaged in to protect the environment which is both sacred to them, and necessary to their existence. As Monnet and Nina point out, loss of these resources impact everyone, including those trying to minimize their footprint by driving electric cars, for example.

A narrative emerges in Nigamon/Tunai to explain a world view that centres around the importance of water, but also copper. It’s an element well known and scientifically proven to purify water. Indigenous peoples have always known this. Once the Anishinaanabe of the North could pick copper off the ground for their rituals and for water purifying, but now multinational corporations mine the copper so extensively that copper has become scarce, and worse, is destroying the mountains and forests where copper is found. In South America, a similar narrative tells of multinationals destroying large tracts of the Amazon with mining and road building and destruction of indigenous lands, and their water sources. Nigamon/Tunai is protest, as well as art. In building the show, Monnet and Nina create a space that is representative of their sacred spaces. They invite us to observe their rituals, and to share water, so that we can better understand the seriousness of what is being lost.

The show begins with sound and light. Figures emerge and disappear into a smoky atmosphere. They circle stones, trees, pools of water, and us, the audience. Metal pitchers are suspended in this space, and as water is poured into them, we realize that these water carriers are also musical instruments. In fact, there are several kinds of metal instruments, including the nose flute, all providing a variety of musical sounds. There are also drums. There is birdsong, and birds from both North and South America are represented. Later, the humans imitate these sounds, and from them, a language begins to emerge. We learn in the post show talk that these sounds are improvised every performance, so that the language that is being created, is always different. Throughout Nigamon/Tunai, explanations are offered in a combination of Anishinaabemowin, Quechua, Spanish, French, and English. We hear these as snatches of conversation between shamans, water protectors and artists in North and South America. They are using both modern and traditional ways of communicating, all with a common goal in mind. To protect the land and the water that sustains them—and which sustains us all.

For Onishka Productions, the point of Nigamon/Tunai is to show us the wealth of knowledge and art created by indigenous peoples, and to focus particularly on the role of women as water protectors. The performers in the show are all women. From them, we learn about the connection between turtles, water and copper. Turtles are literally the backs on which our world is built. Water sustains the trees who are also emotional beings with their own distinct languages. Copper, carried by the women in their water containers, keeps that water pure and drinkable. In the one hundred and five minutes of this dreamlike show, we are invited to discard our modern views of the world, and focus on the essentials for life. Water, copper, and the land that supports all growing things. We emerge from the experience wiser and somehow purified of the noise and bustle of the world outside the performance space.

The 2024 Edinburgh International Festival’s slogan is “rituals that unite us.” Nigamon/Tunai fits that description perfectly. The slow pace of this show won’t be for everyone. But if you are willing to enter the space that the collaboration of indigenous artists from North and South America have created, and to shed your own cultural expectations, you will have a meaningful encounter with very different ways of looking at our world. In its own unique way, Nigamon/Tunai is the copper that purifies us, and sends us back into our own world, looking at our lives through a very different lens. The process is both memorable, and haunting.

NIGAMON/TUNAI at the Edinburgh International Festival – The Studio

Reviewed on 15th August 2024

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Helena Valles

NIGAMON

NIGAMON

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