Some performances captivate. Others consecrate. Onishka Productions’ Nigamon/Tunai, an immersive experience that is co-created and performed by Émilie Monnet (whose mother is Anishinaabe-French, Québec) and Waira Nina (a member of the Inga Nation of the Colombian Amazon), belongs firmly to the latter category. Presented by the Luminato Festival in the Ada Slaight Hall of Daniel Spectrum, this synaesthetic 90-minute offering is not just seen or heard: it is felt viscerally in the mind, body and soul – like a foundational life memory.
Rooted in over a decade of collaboration between Indigenous women from the North and South, Nigamon/Tunai defies theatrical convention. The title means “song” in both Anishinaabemowin (nigamon) and Inga (tunai), which reflects the work’s dual cultural roots and its invocation of music as a sacred and political force. At the intersection of friendship and resistance, Monnet and Nina draw from their own life journeys – and from the shared struggle to protect water and land in the Amazon from the impacts of overmining by Canadian companies – to invite audiences into a deeply personal and political experience that resists patriarchy and colonization.
This is not a play in the traditional sense, but rather a pulsing braid of ceremony, story, and invocation that unfolds within a serene, vast-feeling, otherworldly atmosphere that is lush, unspoiled and evocative. This space created by set designer Julie Christina Piché — with pools and cisterns of water, and trees, grass, and rocks — transports audiences eons and light years from the harried bustle of the city outside, and guides them through shifting realms of earth, water, and sky.
More than simply watching, audience members witness, are coaxed into small acts of participation — and remember, as if activating the memory of some primal ceremony. Seated at different levels within and around the performance space, they become a part of the living environment, like figures gathered on the back of the turtle. A sacred being in many Indigenous cosmologies—and, as envisioned by Monnet and Nina, a symbol of earth, water, and cosmic connection—the turtle evokes Turtle Island, holding the audience in relation to land, story, and the responsibilities that bind us to one another.
Language gives way to rhythm and breath, as the piece unfolds according to moon cycles and the elemental forces of copper, water, and earth. Songs arise not as mere performance, but as offerings: vessels of ancestral memory, resistance, grief, and joy. Singing becomes a political and spiritual act, and listening becomes an act of solidarity.
Through movement, music, audio documentary, and voice, the performers open a sensory space where time folds and layers, and parents and children, past and future, gather together. The immersive sound design by Leonel Vasquez and Frannie Holder and lighting design by Chantal Labonté surround the audience with elemental textures – mounting and dissipating storms, birdsong, percussion, bovalizations, breath – that awaken something older than thought.
Nigamon/Tunai is a remarkable blessing-like experience. And judging by the number of audience members who lingered in the space long after the performance ended, this benediction spoke across generations, continents and cultures, resonating with children, elders, and everyone in between.
Nigamon/Tunai is more than mere art. It is a tonic that reminds us . . . that we have responsibilities to one another and to the land. That stories have great connective power. That healing is not linear. And that transformation often begins in stillness and song.
Nigamon/Tunai will tour to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from September 10 – 13, 2025.
The Luminato Festival continues until June 22, 2025. For full event details, including dates and times, please visit luminatofestival.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
