Internationally acclaimed performer Tanya Tagaq will appear in concert in Pickard Auditorium, Bowdoin College at 7 pm on Sunday January 25. This avant-garde music sensation will create exciting new music against the backdrop of the Inuit film Nanook of the North. Admission is free, but tickets are required. Tickets can be picked up at the Smith Union Information Desk on the college campus beginning January 19, 2015.

Tagaq is a ground-breaking performer who has taken the traditional Inuit throat-singing she heard growing up in Cambridge Bay in the Canadian Arctic and transformed it, infusing it with jazz, punk, and other contemporary music, to create an exciting new sound. Reviewers describe her performances as “fierce,” “exquisite,” “unnerving,” and “emotionally gripping.” She evokes the sounds, visions, and emotions of the northern landscape with her remarkable voice. Tagaq has performed with musicians ranging from Bjork and the Kronos Quartet to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. In 2014 she was awarded the Polaris Music Prize, one of Canada’s top music awards, and her newest album, Animism, was listed as one of the top albums of 2014 by CBC Radio.

Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty’s classic 1922 silent film about life among the Inuit of northern Quebec, is regarded as one of the forerunners of modern documentary films. In 2012, Toronto International Film Festival commissioned composer Derek Charke, along with Tagaq, and her collaborators violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin, to create a new soundscape for this silent classic. Drawing on her love of her northern home, Tagaq brings a depth of emotion and understanding to Flaherty’s essentially colonial vision, reclaiming Nanook for contemporary Inuit.

This concert is presented by the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center with support from the Departments of Music, Cinema Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology, Student Activities, the President’s Office Wabanaki Initiative, and the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund.

Tanya Tagaq in concert with Nanook of the North was commissioned by TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of its film retrospective “First Peoples Cinema: 1500 Nations, One Tradition.”

For more information call Kristi Clifford at 725-3062, or visit the museum’s web page, www.bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum.