MacDowell Downtown’s 21st season opener was on Friday, March 1, at The Monadnock Center for History and Culture with performance artist Allison Akootchook Warden. An Inuit tribal member of the Native Village of Kaktovik off Alaska’s north slope, Allison shared images and music, and several performances. She aimed to shed light on her current project of capturing on video her attempts to reenact the Indigenous practice of transformation.
Performance Artist Allison Akootchook Warden Begins Season Exploring Iñupiaq Transformation Practice
March 1, 2024
Allison Akootchook Warden is drumming and singing, during 2022's First Nations Performing Arts celebration at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. (Tojo Andrianarivo photo)
“My great-grandfather could turn himself into a red fox, my great-grandmother could turn herself into a brown bear, so I am going to do my best to figure out (on camera) how they achieved these feats,” said Warden. The piece will be titled Iluqaisa, an Iñupiaq term that can be translated as “All of you.”
Immediately following graduation from high school, Warden joined the Naa Kaahidi Theatre’s European tour performing traditional Alaskan Native plays. Then she moved to Santa Fe, NM, and began experimenting with performance art at the age of 28 to engage more directly with the audience, something she felt was lacking given the distance between stage and seated audience. “I enjoy the dynamic of almost interacting with an audience that’s much closer physically,” she says. “I find that I need that proximity to learn about myself.” She also writes poetry, complementing her advocacy for preservation of the Iñupiaq language, which is spoken by the Indigenous people of northern Alaska.
At MacDowell, Warden took a break after a busy period of creating site-specific works and performances, and developed a new series of installations to be experienced in a museum setting. She shot using a stationary video camera as she moved within the frame recreating the choreography of transformation to becoming a polar bear, attempting to go to the moon, and viewing the other side of the world through water.
“I’m hoping to have finished works at the end of my residency ready to be shared with the public,” she says, adding that she’ll also be writing poetry when she’s not working on the video series. “I’m really excited to be at MacDowell. I’m honored to be with such creative people and having the chance to be in spaces that have been occupied by so many phenomenal artists.”
Thanks to those who joined us when Allison Akootchook Warden wove traditional Indigenous practice and language into an unforgettable performance experience.
More MacDowell Saturday at the Toadstool
Join us downtown on Saturday morning, March 2, at 11 a.m. at the Toadstool Bookshop for a reading of eight-time MacDowell Fellow Katherine Min’s novel The Fetishist, which was completed by her daughter Kayla Min Andrews after Katherine died in 2019. Kayla, who will be joined by her brother Clay, will read from the book and then will be joined by poet and MacDowell Fellow Rebecca Kaiser Gibson for a brief Q&A. Rebecca met Katherine during her first MacDowell residency in 1996. Katherine’s family worked to permanently endow a Fellowship at MacDowell, and this marks the first time they’ve visited Peterborough since their mother’s last residency in 2013.