Review: Combining circus spectacle and Inuit myth, Unikkaaqtuat both stuns and stumbles

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In the most startling scene of the new circus-theatre hybrid Unikkaaqtuat, an Arctic ice floe, as comically overloaded as a clown car, tips, and the men and women crowded onto it suddenly topple, terrifyingly, into the frigid sea.

Underwater, two women (Charlotte Qamaniq and Christine Tootoo) float upside down - they’re actually swinging from hanging fabric – and throat sing in what sounds like a melancholy acceptance of their fate.

But another woman (Marjorie Nantel) fights her drowning in a desperate, struggling acrobatic routine on the hanging silks. Ultimately, she ends up suspended, doing the splits high above the stage.

Cue shock and applause from the crowd at the show’s world premiere at the National Arts Centre’s new Indigenous Theatre in Ottawa on Thursday.

Source: Globe & Mail