ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses upon the musical and theatrical works of the Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq and her contribution to a global artistic discourse. She intends to address Tagaq's musical performance practice: her gestures and body movements on stage, her wardrobe, her iconography, and her speech, all of which disclose a specific style, a signature style. Tagaq also violates Western musical sound conventions through 'primitive sounds', through a markedly rough sounding throat singing that could be deemed ugly and strange or even disturbing to the untrained ear. The goal of the author is not to analyse co-modal gesture/voice relations, but rather to focus on the connections that Tagaq maintains with both Inuit and Western culture. Tagaq learned katajjaq from audiotapes that her mother sent her while she was studying in Halifax in the 1990s; she had also seen it practiced in its original context.
