Split Tooth: Saputjiji at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

Split Tooth: Saputjiji is a new performance of Tanya Tagaq’s, drawing from her acclaimed book Split Tooth and her new album Saputjiji. Tagaq’s vocal power collapses boundaries. Her performance summons genetic memory and future visions, bringing the now to audiences with a visceral and cyclonic power; the eye of the storm allowing softness.

Directed by Kaneza Schaal, known for her boundary-breaking work in opera and theatre, Saputjiji merges Tagaq’s vocal landscapes into a staged environment that blurs music and memory, landscape and breath, body and cosmos. Split Tooth: Saputjiji is not an adaptation so much as an expansion—an expression of thought rendered through sound and image.

Channelling the Split Tooth universe into a new theatrical language, the performance carries the book’s lyrical power into new dimensions, revealing the deep continuities between language and breath, violence and transcendence, music and body. The work initiates recognition with the future through mythic realism, and climbs the iron girders of the past with polar bear claws; sowing you the now. Be in the now. It’s all we have.