INUVIK
A group of Inuvik youth had a good reason to dance.
Celebrated singer Susan Aglukark was in Inuvik last week to head up a dance workshop with some local youth. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo
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Four dancers and performers had a chance to work with celebrated singer Susan Aglukark from April 8 to 11 at the Midnight Sun Recreation Complex. They quickly dubbed themselves the "Treeline Dancers" as they laboured for three days to master a new routine coupled with Aglukark's haunting music.
The workshop was part of the singer's Nomad tour, she explained after the group debuted their dance on April 11.
Aglukark said she had the idea of the workshop in mind for several years, perhaps as long as 15. Recently, she applied for a Canada Council for the Arts grant to help fund it. When it was approved, she chose Inuvik as one of the first locations to try it out.
Aglukark said she has a preference and a sentimental soft spot for Inuvialuit dance and performance. She was born in Churchill, Man., and raised in Arviat in what's now Nunavut, but her childhood ties to the NWT remain strong.
"It's the most stunning thing I have ever seen," she said, referring to Inuvialuit cultural performances. "I think it works so well because they do so much at incorporating the young into their dances. They've made such a very successful effort to revive it to the young people."
Aglukark said that normally it can take a year to successfully design and learn a new dance program, so it was out of the ordinary to see a public performance of something that had only been worked on for three days.
The Treeline Dancers are made up of Alecia Lennie, Lance Gray, Keenan Carpenter and Jimmy Kalinek.
They all said it wasn't an intimidating process to work with Aglukark, although they might have been a little star-struck at first.
"I got used to it," said Carpenter with a dash of understatement. "It was maybe a little intimidating at first.
"I've been drum dancing for 12 years," he continued. "It's a family thing. My mother bribed me into it, and then I fell in love with it."
His mother actually paid him to start dancing, he said, but that came to a stop later.
Kalinek said he's been dancing since 2009. He saw some visiting dancers from Alaska that year, he explained, and was deeply affected.
"They really moved me with their power," he said. "It sent chills up my spine. It just went from there.
"Susan was very welcoming, very down-to-earth," Kalinek added. "We had a lot of fun."
Lennie was the shyest of the quartet. She said she "grew up drum dancing."
"I wasn't going to come at first, but she's really easy to work with, and I wound up coming in the afternoon because I had school in the morning. When I walked through the door I wondered what I was getting into, but she's really easy-going."
Aglukark was asked to perform several songs during the evening performance on April 11. Spontaneously, the four youth burst out into some freestyle dancing during her performances, thrilling the audience and delighting the singer.
