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Introduction
Jeremy Dutcher is a Canadian Musician performing Mehcinut from the Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa album. The song Mehcinut means death chant and is one of the many in this traditional album. Dutcher explains that Mehcinut is a traditional song written to celebrate life both in death and birth periods. The video of the song shows Dutcher and traditional dancers give their best performances to celebrate their ancestral spirits. This performance aims to celebrate culture by embracing culture from the past to present and future.
The Goal of the Performance
The goal of this performance is to revive or embrace the ancestral culture. Dutcher revives his ancestral culture by reminding his generation of their traditional singing. According to Gioia, Dutcher belongs to the lineage of Jim Paul. With each line of the song, Dutcher conjures the spirits of his ancestors in remembrance of their well-lived lives. The song is written in the Eastern Algonquian family language that the deceased family members used. By reviving the traditional language in the 21st century, Dutcher aims at priding in the traditional culture. In Canada, the most recent generation is raised and taught to communicate in English, thus forgetting or abandoning their traditional culture. The forgotten traditions stem from the culture in which their ancestors grew; hence acknowledging them is a way of remembering them. The performance of this song reaches the intended goal in several ways.
Achievement of the Goal
Words Used in the Song
The goal of Dutcher in Mehcinut is to celebrate ancestral culture and is attained in different ways. One of the ways is that the song celebrates life in two phases, death and birth of humans. These phases are illustrated in words used in the song. The song is not in English; hence the translation of the lyrics in the video may not be very accurate. The emotional and mourning song begins by saying that he went. The song does not contain many words, or rather, the translated words are few as the singer seem to repeat similar phrases. The mourning words show that the singer remembers his loved ones who are already deceased.
More words say that even though the deceased is gone, the left ones are happy and appreciate them. The song lyrics move from death to birth, where they mention that life goes by accepting new life in children. The songs lyrics mean that there is more to celebrate in birth, even after losing our loved ones. The death of our loved ones may bring sadness, but the birth of a newborn in the same generation brings happiness. Birth after death acts as a replacement of a soul hence the need to keep the spirits of the ancestors alive through remembering the songs they sang.
In an interview, Dutcher makes comments about the debut video of the song Mehcinut. He says that the song calls back for the deceased and reaches forward to the future generation. The celebration of past and future lives in relation to culture shows that culture never dies but lives across all generations. Dutcher added that the song calls for indigenous continuation in the form of all those who have gone before and those yet to come. The song Mehcinut the indigenous culture as a fading one. In the interview, Dutcher mentions that indigenous people are fading alongside their cultural nature; hence, their memories are left. By reviewing the past and eyeing the future, the author indicates the importance of indigenous continuation in the generations.
Dutcher calls for his community to embrace the indigenous culture and pass it to the next generations. He mentions that the community as a unit should stand together and show the world what they have done. The song is also a message of what the community can do for the sake of the coming generations. The future encourages the fading of indigenous practices; hence action should be taken now. Dutcher, in the interview, calls for amplification of indigenous voices in the past, present, and future to inspire artistic visions. The song Mehcinut is one of the many sang in the past and contained indigenous wisdom of music. Such wisdom should be taught to present and future generations so that the artists will grow alongside the culture and its practices.
Style of Music and Performers Costumes
The song Mehcinut is classical indigenous opera music that borrows the techniques of folk songs. Gioia states that Mehcinut blends folk, classical composition, electronics, and folk aspects of genresin his analysis. It is a traditional song that celebrates indigenous culture practiced by ancestral artists like Jim Paul. Mehcinut combines the voice of Jeremy Dutcher and Jim Paul as a way of continuing past in the present. The performers of the music are traditional dancers who show their indigenous tricks on the stage. On the stage, Dutcher wears a red jumpsuit with a black transparent cover cloth on top. He is also wearing a brown hut with traditional decorations on its edges and a brown feather at its back. Both female and male dancers at the stage are wearing brown dresses or tops and shorts with salsa clothing decoration in the top cloths. At the second stage, different performers are wearing varied traditional costumes that complement the songs mood.
The Performance
The electric, extravagant, and excellent performance of the song Dutcher opened Mehcinut. Performed in various stages of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Dutcher makes a dramatic entrance before the music begins. He slowly moves up to the stage while holding his cloth cover and sits on the piano seat, ready to perform. Dutcher begins to play the piano as he sings along the beats. His body also immerses into the song emotions and swing along from side to side. As he sings in low and high pitches, Dutcher sinks deep into the song mood to express the emotions of the mourning theme. As the dancers promptly appear from his back, Dutcher begins to move his head from side to side to rhyme with their choreography.
The three traditionally costumed dancers emerge from down to top as they take their position in a straight line. They move alongside the piano beats by involving their whole bodies. They raise their hands and swing them from side to side together with their upper bodies as their hair covers their faces. Including Dutcher, the dancers swing from back to front with hands spread to the side as they fall to the end of the first stanza. As the instrumental music plays to prepare for the next stanza, one dancer slides under the piano table and emerges to the other side. The other two dancers move spontaneously with instrument beats in different moves, including holding hands, bending the upper bodies, jumping, raising hands, holding heads together in a circle, and falling back and forth to end the instrumental break.
The dancers put up a stunning prop as the music prepares to move from one scene to another. They all come together, bend, looking in the same direction of the museum ceiling as it turns from clear white to light red. Dutcher then runs down the stairs to meet the next performers in the downstairs stage, the table of excellence. According to Dutcher, the table of excellence is formed by indigenous cultural leaders, filmmakers, artists, and activists from all over Canada gathering at the adapted installation, After the hunt by Emily Jan. Their presence is an indication of the power of traditions.
The table of excellence features at least 10 leaders, with some standing and others, sitting. The leaders are positioned from one table end to the other while facing the front side of the table. The performers are wearing different costumes to represent their varied characters in the song and their respective industries. As the song plays on, these characters move different parts of their bodies and assume different meaningful poses. On the table are various indigenous collections from the museum. Some of the visible items in the table include a white jug, a fish, flower pots, apples, red grapes, a warthog head, the head skeleton of a dead animal, and a black and white bird. The 10 leaders also have a glass of wine placed directly beside them on the table.
Tantoo Cardinal, a film actress, makes a special appearance in the song whereby she dances alongside three other traditional dancers. Together, they bow down and rise, facing the same direction. Cardinal, alongside the dancers, moves up and down as she gazes at one spot while covering one of her eyes. They move to the first stage, where there is piano, and join Dutcher. Including Dutcher, they all stand to dance in different directions. The 10 characters at the table of excellence watch the dance with smiles on their faces. At the end of their performance, one dancer carries another in their back in an acrobatic style.
The final scene shows a woman holding and kissing a smiling baby. Cardinal requests to hold the baby, and the mother hands it over. The babys presence indicates rebirth of indigenous culture, and the passing of the baby from mother to Cardinal indicates the movement of the culture from present to the past. To mark the end of the performance, Dutcher leaves the Aga Khan Museum while still in his costumes.
Conclusion
Dutchers performance of the song Mehcinut is a celebration of indigenous culture. The song draws the past, present, and future as it eliminates death and welcomes ancestral cultures rebirth. The museums traditional performance showed the importance of past collections today and in the future. The song challenges todays community to embrace indigenous practice so they can teach the future generation. Children as the future of the community hence must be taught the ways of their ancestors.
Bibliography
Aker, Rudi. Jeremy Dutcher: Wolastoqiyik Futurities. Artlink 27, no. 2 (2020): 66-69. Web.
In Conversation with: Jeremy Dutcher. Youtube. Video. 42:13, posted by Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 2020. Web.
Jeremy Dutcher Mehcinut. Youtube. Video. 5:47, Posted by Jeremy Dutcher, 2019. Web.
Gioia, Jim D. Jeremy Dutcher, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. DOMINIONATED. 2020. Web.
Newhook, Kathryn E. Dutchers Impact: Wolastioqiyik Lintuwakonawa as a Case Study for the role of Music in Preserving Traditional Knowledge. Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management no.15. (2019). Web.
Woloshyn, Alexa. Reclaiming the Contemporaryin Indigeneity: The Musical Practices of Cris Derksen and Jeremy Dutcher. Contemporary Music Review 39, no.2 (2020): 206-230. Web.
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