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JOHANNA DOMOKOS
were always closely related to practical life. Thanks to the highly dynamic and
effective Sami emancipation movement of the 1970s and 1980s, institutions
dedicated to the production and promotion of Sami arts, as well as education
about them, have developed rapidly. Various festivals and events created by
Sami cultural activist artists have offered an arena for presenting Sami art be¬
yond the Sami communities, triggering a cultural shift in labor of establishing
autonomous art forms. Strongly based around a dozen of their high quality,
highly productive, and mobile artists, by the beginning of the twenty-first¬
century Sami arts had gained a strong reputation in national, Nordic, and
indigenous contexts. In creating their unique profiles, SAmi artists often draw
from universal, Scandinavian, indigenous, and uniquely Sami cultural rituals
and objects (e.g., the latter includes the topics, the artifacts, the images, and
sounds of the reindeer herding life style, or the costumes and beliefs related
to traditional singing).
SAMI DRAMA AND YOIK
Ihe birth of the literary genre of Sami drama is strongly connected to the
development of SAmi theater. Often the directors or actors were the ones who
produced these texts for performance. Today Sami drama enjoys a wide range
of numerous plays written mainly in one of the many Sami languages; however,
the integration of other languages into the plays is also common. This does not
pose any particular challenge for the multilingual Sami artists and their audi¬
ence; rather, it is more often the Sami language itself that might create barriers
to understanding (as opposed to the official national languages or English).
One of the main characteristics of Sami drama and theater performances
is an openness to the Sami singing tradition, the yoik, as well as the inclusion
of historic or new age shamanic symbolism. The Hungarian scholar, Idiké
Tamas describes the yoik as:
...the symbol of identity, of the belonging together of the community sharing
common concepts about human existence... Yoik is much more than an improvised
song and much more than a folk song, and if we want to define what it is, we need to
cross the borders between musicology, philology, and folklore studies to encompass
a reflection of the widest possible horizon of Sami culture. Yoik contains qualities
of both the sacred and the profane, and its functional aspects penetrate other areas
of Sami society than simply those of ritual songs.*
Tamás Ildikó: Tűzön át, jégen át. A sarkvidéki nomád lappok énekhagyománya, Budapest,
Napkút Kiadó, 2007, 25. Trans. Johanna Domokos.
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