It is difficult to describe the sound that emerges from a skilled Mongolian throat singer. Sometimes called “diphonic” singing, the technique produces two (sometimes more) notes simultaneously, underscoring a high, eerie keen with a deep, guttural tone. Throat singing is grounded in a complex millennia-old music tradition. Scientific American calls it “at once a part of an expressive culture and an artifact of the acoustics of the human voice.”

In December, award-winning throat singer Bat-Orshikh Bazarvaani arrived in Banff from Mongolia for a remarkable new collaboration between The Banff Centre and the Toronto-based dance and theatre company Red Sky Performance. Led by Sandra Laronde, Red Sky founding artistic director, and the Centre’s newly appointed director of Aboriginal Arts, this new work of original dance, movement, and music brings together traditional and contemporary indigenous cultures from First Nations Canada and Mongolia. With the working title Faster, Higher, Stronger: The Mongolian Project, the work will premiere as part of the 2008 Banff Summer Arts Festival before travelling to China for the Beijing Olympics Cultural Festival, the only Canadian show invited.

“I always wanted to work with Mongolia,” Laronde says. She cites existing parallels between the steppe culture of central Asia and that of the First Nations people of the North American plains. “To my knowledge, the similarities have never been explored artistically and culturally before.”

Early in 2007 Laronde toured China with the Red Sky company, performing one of their original works, Caribou Song. She was invited to return to Asia in July, to attend the Naadam Festival in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Celebrating suur-kharbaan or “manly games,” Naadam is the biggest public event in the region, bringing together the most skilled athletes in archery, wrestling, and horse racing. Laronde started to get a sense of the intense physicality of Mongolian culture, and the ways in which the culture is completely interdependent on the horse and the land. During the trip, Laronde met two of the singers who would become part of this new project. Batmend Baasankhuu and Tuvshinijargal Damdinjav are both long song singers, a traditional form of vocal music that helps to preserve oral history among the nomadic people of Mongolia. Damdinjav is one of the most revered of the region’s existing long song singers, designated an Honoured Artist of the Mongolian State. A teacher and founder and director of the Long Song Union, he has toured to more than 20 countries.

Laronde invited them, along with Bazarvaani, to travel to Banff for the first creation residency of Faster, Higher, Stronger. “This residency explores the relationship of culture, land, and dance, but also explores music as well,” she says. The music is integral to bringing the world of Mongolia to the stage. “Throat singing is inseparable from Mongolia,” Bazarvaani says. “It is inseparable from our landscape, our tradition, and our people.”

“ Long song singing is particularly powerful and moving. I sense an ancient sound in the songs…”

Sandra Laronde, Red Sky artistic director, and Aboriginal Arts director, The Banff Centre

 

With her collaborators, including composer and musician Rick Sacks, and dancers Carlos Rivera, Julia Taffe, Jinny Jacinto, and Ugo Mazinwosu, Laronde is eager to create a performance work that explores the similarities and the differences between Mongolian and North American cultures.

“We start with the music, to give us a sense of tone and texture,” she says. “That will start to inform the movement.” The Mongolian singers have brought a couple of traditional stringed instruments with them, including a horse head fiddle, or morin khuur. It produces a haunting, faraway note that instantly recalls a vast, limitless plain. Using the fiddle and song lyrics, the singers are skilled at mimicking the sounds of their surroundings – the rush of a mountain stream, the steady canter of a horse, the melodic lilt of birdsong. In the Banff studio, they merge these sounds with the western influences of Sacks’s marimba and percussion compositions.

“Long song singing is particularly powerful and moving,” Laronde says. “I sense an ancient sound in the songs, which is what I also hear in First Nations singing. “I can hear our ancestors in their voices when they sing which means they still have a voice.” She plans to invite collaboration from traditional First Nations singers and drummers for the next phase of creative development on the project.

Though much of the movement in Laronde’s past productions has been informed by contemporary Aboriginal dance with traditional elements – including an exploration of Australian indigenous dance culture in the 2006 production, Shimmer – this performance will be strongly influenced by Mongolian and First Nations movement and dance. She has discovered that, because Mongolia is an environment ruled by extremes – in distance, temperature, isolation – the culture has responded with extreme forms of expression, such as the impossible complexity of the technique behind throat singing, and a form of traditional dance that is performed mainly by dancers on their knees.

Inspired by her travel in Asia, and by Mongolian movement and music, Laronde has come up with several themes that provide a structure to Faster, Higher, Stronger. The production will be heavily grounded in the theme of horse culture, spanning plains traditions in Asia and North America, and will rise into the realm of the magical with a storyline about Shamanism on both continents. But she is also interested in bringing in the element of the great leader, inspired by the story of the Mongolian warrior Ghenghis Khan, and some of the First Nations leaders in North America – Poundmaker, Big Bear, the Nez Percé Chief Joseph.

Still in an early stage of exploration and creative development, the work has been a revelation for Laronde and her collaborators, an intense experience of discovery and innovation. “Art is all about co-operation,” says Baasankhuu, who made his first visit to Canada for the residency. “It never takes only one person, so we’ve enjoyed this process.”

Faster, Higher, Stronger will headline the Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations at the Banff Summer Arts Festival, with performances on July 3, 4, and 5, 2008.