Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Basically,” singer/composer Ossie Kairaiuak of the dance group Pamyua says, “we are
telling a story. The singers tell it verbally and the dancers paint pictures of it.” These are
stories of the Yupik lifestyle, Ossie says, who was born in Chefornak, as well as “things
you have experienced personally.” He described one song he wrote when he “got tired of
looking at my sleepy students” in a class he was teaching. Pamyua sang “Sleepy Song”
that evening in performance and the troupe had the audience in hysterics as Ossie chas-
tised his sleepy “students.”
“Dancing has kept our people strong,” Ossie says. He tells the story of a trip his uncle
made with a dog sled team, only to be stopped by the voices of dogs howling at him from
all sides. He decided the spirits were warning him of danger ahead, and so he came home
and made a song about it. It's a teaching song, warning you to listen to the spirits when
they speak to you. “Dancing is a way to reclaim who we are,” Ossie says.
By tradition the first dance of the festival is danced by the host village, in this case the
Bethel Traditional Dancers. There were about twenty of them, both sexes, all ages, and the
first thing that struck me was that there is no invisible wall between Alaska Native dan-
cers and the audience, the wall so firmly in place in other cultures' performance art. Dur-
ing the music Native dancers move around on stage, they trade fans with people seated
offstage, little kids run up to their singing mothers and away again, they wave, they smile,
they talk, all while nobody misses a beat.
At times the dance seems like on-the-job training, as the dancers look to each other for
cues, especially the younger ones. For one thing, there have never been so many dancers
before. “Only three to five dancers in olden times,” says Joe Chief, Jr. “Some older people
mumbling away, too many dancers now.” Joe learned to dance sitting on his auntie's lap
as she moved his arms and legs in the movements. As relaxed as it looks to the audience,
Joe says it takes lots of rehearsal “to make the songs and the singers and the drummers to
sing at one time.”
Even if you're deaf you'll enjoy looking because the costumes are so beautiful. The
women wear kuspuks, the knee-length anorak of the Yupik and the Inupiaq, made of
gaily-colored fabric and trimmed with rickrack. Most of them wear elaborate headdresses
with upstanding crowns of fur and beaded headbands and bead fringes that send out
flashes of color and sparkle as they move. The men wear men's kuspuks, usually in a
