Steppe to it

This article originally ran on July 2, 2008. Tono is part of Vancouver's 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

In the winter of 2006, Sandra Laronde visited the city of Yinchuan, China, with Red Sky, her Toronto-based aboriginal dance troupe. Yinchuan lies just south of Mongolia, and Laronde remembers looking out toward that fabled country – whose most famous figure remains the 13th-century conqueror Genghis Khan – and thinking, "That’s our next project, right there."

At the time, she had only a vague picture of Mongolia’s nomadic native people and their lives on the rugged steppes, but she sensed a connection with Canada’s First Nations. "I knew it was a really great horse culture, like ours in the western plains of Canada," Laronde says during a recent telephone interview from Alberta’s Banff Centre, where she runs the Aboriginal Arts program. "I knew that they had a form of shamanism, as well – there were a lot of shared themes. They’re the lesser known, and the lesser known always intrigues me immensely."

Two years later, Laronde knows Mongolia a lot better. She has visited the country, met its artists and tasted its traditions. And, as she predicted, she’s put the resulting experience into a new Red Sky project. Tono: Higher, Faster, Stronger, which plays July 3-5 at the Banff Centre’s summer arts festival, is a collaboration between Laronde’s company and performers from Mongolia and China. After its brief preview in Banff, Red Sky will take the show to the Beijing Olympics’ cultural festival in September.

Tono elaborates on those intuited links between Mongolian and Canadian aboriginal culture. Expect a performance involving horses, shamans and tribal identity in which Blackfoot mythology goes hand in hand with the legend of Genghis Khan. The title itself evokes the East/West parallel: The tono is the smoke-hole ring at the top of the traditional Mongolian nomadic dwelling, the ger. The tono symbolizes the gateway to the spirit world, and when Laronde first saw one, it reminded her of a North American circle with a similar spiritual significance: "It looked like a medicine wheel to me."

The production, directed by Laronde, features three Mongolian musicians, Bat-Orshikh Bazarvaani, Tuvshinijargal Damdinjav and Batmend Baasankhuu, who have worked alongside Red Sky composer Rick Sacks to create the live score. The dancers include three performers from China’s Inner Mongolia region – Cai Hong, Eri deng tu and Wei Jei – as well as Red Sky regular Carlos Rivera, Raul Talamantes, Eldon Weasel Child and contortionist Jinny Jacinto.

Tono is Red Sky’s seventh production since Laronde started the company in 2000. The Toronto director-actor-dancer, a member of northern Ontario’s Teme-Augama Anishinabe people, founded Red Sky to explore the meeting points between native cultures. The troupe’s previous shows include its much-travelled Caribou Song, a family tale by Cree playwright Tomson Highway, which has toured to China and Iceland, and Shimmer, a work created with aboriginal artists from Australia and the Torres Strait Islands.

Laronde said Shimmer’s successful run at the 2006 Banff Summer Arts Festival prompted the Banff Centre to get involved in the Mongolian project. Tono was co-commissioned by the institution and Toronto’s Luminato Festival, where it will tour next spring. (Laronde’s unrelated appointment as the Banff Centre’s Aboriginal Arts head occurred last fall.)

Laronde met her Mongolian collaborators at last year’s Naadam Festival, the country’s celebration of traditional sports and culture, in the capital of Ulanbaatar. There, she witnessed one of the festival’s famous cross-country horse races and encountered the endangered art of the urtyn duu, or "long song."

"I’m there [at Nadaam] and I see about 300 horses being raced," she recalls, "this cloud of dust coming through the grasslands. The jockeys are between the ages of five and nine years old, riding full tilt on a horse for about an hour. And at the end, there was this incredibly beautiful song of praise. Later, I found out it was a style of singing called 'long song.' "

Entranced by its epic beauty, Laronde secured the services of Damdinjav and Baasankhuu, two of Mongolia’s top urtyn duu singers, for her project. Bazarvaani, a throat singer who also plays the morin khuur, or horse-head fiddle, rounded out the trio.

Mongolian throat singing is itself a cultural bridge; it uses the same hair-raising vocal techniques as Inuit throat singing, but in Mongolia, it is primarily practised by men. The three musicians have been involved with the project from the beginning; the current work grew out of a series of exploratory workshops at the Banff Centre last December. Laronde describes Tono as a non-narrative dance drama that uses indigenous horse culture as its motif.

"The horse to First Nations and Mongolian people is highly respected," she says, "it’s not the European beast of burden. Rather, it’s a creature that assists but also has a spiritual place in their everyday lives." Among other sources, Laronde draws on a Blackfoot creation tale in which a human dreams the horse into existence and makes a pact with it involving mutual respect. Later, the horses pull into the world the shamans – humans who carry "horse medicine."

The choreography, created by Laronde with Roger Sinha, has an equine accent. "I was very interested in the percussive nature of the horse: the stampedes, their various gaits, in terms of trotting or galloping," Laronde says. "So it’s a very dynamic piece that demands a lot of pretty sophisticated rhythms." The dance also has an acrobatic element courtesy of Peruvian-Canadian contortionist Jacinto. "I wanted someone who could convey the otherworldliness of the shaman," Laronde says. "When the shaman dreams, they often dream upside down, whereas normal people dream right-side up."

The Mongolian singers brought to the mix traditional songs and tales about the horse – including a horse whisperer’s lullaby – as well as the shaman-leader Genghis Khan. To westerners, that name usually conjures up the stereotype of a rapacious barbarian, laying waste with fire and sword, but Genghis (or more properly, Chinggis Khaan) was more complex than that. "To the Mongolians, he’s the greatest shaman that ever lived," Laronde says. "Even in war, in battles, he often had shamans on the front lines and he followed shamanic advice. He was told who he would defeat and how far he would go."

Tono seems particularly timely, coming on the heels of Mongol, Sergei Bodrov’s recent Oscar-nominated film about Genghis Khan’s early life and rise to power. Laronde – who has seen the movie, of course – agrees: "Our projects are like that. It’s pretty strange. We’ll hit on something and then suddenly all this other stuff starts showing up."

Apart from Toronto, Tono will also be playing dates in Calgary, Edmonton, Nanaimo, Ottawa and Vancouver during the 2009-10 season. Before that, however, there’s the Beijing gig, as well as performances in Ulanbaatar and Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. Laronde is excited to be taking the show to Mongolian and Chinese audiences, but she says Tono has already piqued the interest of expatriates.

"The other day, an impromptu concert happened in our studio with the Mongolian musicians and about 60 Mongolian people who’d come up from Calgary," she says. "It was so wonderful; I don’t think Canadians realize how many Mongolians are living here."

Laronde believes projects like this one help reveal the underlying similarities of cultures that, on the surface, can seem vastly different. "At a fundamental level, the culture of the original peoples has served as a foundation for many of the civilizations of today," she said. "And despite all the differences that countries have, at the root is the shared experience of its first peoples – no matter where you go."

Tono: A Red Sky Production runs at the Vancouver Playhouse as part of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, Feb. 11, 13 and 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.