Actor and dancer Elisabeth Heilmann Blind moved jerkily from side to side while keeping the audience’s eyes firmly fixed on her. We were at the seminar Kalaallit Inuit Performance, arranged by the Art as Forum centre under the auspices of the University of Copenhagen. Despite the academic credentials, at this moment the event felt far removed from all thoughts of reading lists and dry-as-dust theory.
The discipline “Uaajeerneq,” masked dance, is among the oldest forms of artistic expression in Greenland. It is also a tradition from which Blind’s own generation has been cut off. The practice was forbidden under Danish colonial rule, which was rooted in Christianity and rejected and excluded traditional spiritual rituals.
At a small makeup table onstage, Blind applied pigments along her facial bones: black for the spirits and the realms of magic, red for the blood and all things life-giving, and white for purity and the connection to the ancestors. “In masked dance,” she explained, “you erase your own identity in order to become the dancer.” She tied a string around her face, which deformed it and made it asymmetrical, while she explained how a human being undertakes a journey through the three phases of the dance.
The first stage is the frightening one, which is about meeting your own limitations and honing your mental forces in order to overcome fear. Then comes the erotic phase, the force inherent in bringing forth new generations. The final phase is the comic one. Blind stuck out her tongue and winked at us; no one can survive without humour, and that holds true in the Arctic, too.
In a sense, Blind’s demonstration of the masked dance encapsulated the entire seminar. Because one of the burning questions was: How can artists relate and respond to a tradition that is no longer practised in its original form? As Inuit, how do you relate and respond to realms of experience and knowledge that are neither conveyed orally, nor passed down in written sources? These were the themes of the day’s seminar, but perhaps also broader issues in the obviously difficult conversation between Danes and Inuit in a political reality where, more than ever, we need to listen and understand where each of us is coming from.
Set at the venue Forsøgsstationen in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district, the seminar (organized by dramaturg Sirí Paulsen and scholars Naja Dyrendom Graugaard and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt) took its point of departure in the performing arts, but as Schmidt explained at the outset, the very division into genres – theatre, performance art, and literature – is a colonial way of thinking, and one which the seminar very much sought to challenge. “We must find ways to accommodate the living experience anchored and lodged in the body,” she said.
At the age of twelve, actor Makka Kleist came to Denmark on her own as part of an educational programme for talented Inuit. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the adults asked her, to which Kleist replied: “An actor.” “But you can’t do Shakespeare with your face,” they told her. Later, at the Tuukkaq Theatre (1975–1994) in Fjaltring in Lemvig in Denmark, she learned to work with the body, and through research into Greenlandic history she realised how the colonial period is just a very small part of the full scope of Inuit history. These two insights became the foundation of Nunatta Isiginnaartitsisarfia (The National Theatre of Greenland), the performing arts school she founded in Nuuk in 2011, which takes its starting point in Inuit’s own knowledge, language, and outlook on culture and history.
The relationship between Danish influence on the one hand and a decolonial search for one’s roots on the other was a predictable, yet not uninteresting, focal point for much of the seminar. The most powerful contributions were the personal stories about finding your way back to something you were not even conscious of carrying with you.
Basing her presentation on artist and writer Pia Arke’s (1958–2007) concept of “the bastard,” artist Jessie Kleemann recounted how she was constantly asked about her background when she moved to Denmark in 2012. At an event arranged at the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen as part of the annually recurring “Culture Night” festival, she decided to give the Danes what they apparently wanted, and so she ended up performing with seal blubber. As Kleemann elaborated, it was all about confronting the viewers with their own expectations: Why do Danes expect Inuit artists to produce something different from other artists? “After all, the Danes taught us the ‘proper’ ways to eat, learn, and pray. It’s insulting when Danes expect to be presented with a specific Greenlandic culture that their own ancestors whipped out of us,” she said.
Kleemann’s experience resonated with performance artist Siri Paulsen: “Being Inuit, you’ll often find yourself invited because you’re supposed to represent something, which essentially means you’re seen as Other. It’s strange, because the Danes have been in Greenland so long that we’ve become intertwined.”
Artist Kuluk Helms nodded in agreement and said that two different paradigms exist in Greenland: the Inuit one and the European one. As an Inuk, you learn to navigate both worlds because all institutions and infrastructures in Greenland remain colonial, but as a European, you only understand one. This makes decolonisation difficult, she explained, because it means that Danes often expect the Inuit world to be explained through Western paradigms rather than striving to build a bridge between the two worldviews.
Not until the age of 27 did Helms began to see herself as Inuk: “I look like my Danish father, and so people often see me as Danish. You internalise that. At the same time, you get further in the world if you are Danish, and you internalise that too.” She went on to tell the story of a movement exercise at a theatre school in London, where she realised that she moved differently from the other students. In Greenland, she discovered masked dance and recognised her own body’s movements in it.
“My body knew something about me, about my background and culture, that my brain didn’t know,” said Helms, who is currently undertaking an artistic practice-based PhD, a type of education that gives her the opportunity to work with knowledge not rooted in Western logic. At her performance lecture later in the day, she began by lighting a qulliq, an oil lamp traditionally used to provide light and warmth in the Arctic, where no wood grows. Today, the lamp carries spiritual and symbolic significance as a link to the ancestors. Speaking in a soft voice and pronouncing the words slowly, she delivered a series of short compositions that seemed to speak the language of poetry rather than that of decolonial theory.
The dilemma of rediscovering a culture that has been lost without ending up mired in mere nostalgia was clearly evident in several of the seminar presentations. Dramaturg Sirí Paulsen, spoke about working on the theatre production Det Vandrende Menneske (The Wandering Human), currently on at Nordatlantens Brygge in Copenhagen. The play specifically explores how it is possible to remain true to your roots while also moving forward. “What we need is not to go back in time, but to move into the future and reinvent ourselves. You can’t do that if you don’t have roots,” Paulsen said.
The current high-tension geopolitical situation underpinned the conversation like an undercurrent throughout, but came to the fore with special clarity when the seminar turned to the question of how to move into the future. Striking a balance between reclaiming traditions and a present-day reality in which American imperialism is disrupting the old debate about the relationship between Greenland and Denmark appeared difficult for many of the participants.
Dine Arnannguaq Fenger Lynge, managing director of Dáiddadállu – Sámi Artist Network, urged the audience to emulate Norway, where a conversation has been established around how institutions have a responsibility to build knowledge about Sámi culture, and such initiatives have even received financial backing. Such efforts centre on building capacity and confidence in Sámi communities, particularly among young people: “It takes time, resources, and respect,” Lynge added.
Kuluk Helms neatly wrapped up the entire day’s conversation when she said: “The colonial system is about breaking down Inuit confidence, knowledge, and embodied experience. Inuit knowledge resides in the body; it is not Western, and we should be proud of that. Through our art, we can dismantle the colonial logic and rise up as a people.”
