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SCRIPTED AND EMBODIED RITUALITY IN A YOIK-NOH PERFORMANCE Artists of the Sami theater and performing arts quickly understood the yoik’s potential to become the ideal trademark and export product of Sämi culture. Based on small-scale melody, with variable rhythmic patterns, the poetics of the living yoik are flexible, allowing for a large degree of adaptation and incorporation of outside elements while remaining identifiable as a yoik. For example, modern yoik singing can accommodate the rhythms of the African djembe drum, American country and rock ’n’ roll, and even Hawaiian music or the Indian tabla, as well as Burundian whisper music with further elements of pop, rock, jazz, blues, rap, or techno, while Sami music itself has lent its own influence to traditional and commercial music. Since many Sami artists were exposed to these genres from an early age (however not in their mother tongue), it was challenging, but not especially difficult, to develop a specific Sami theater practice. And today, though the indigenous population of Sami does not always enjoy favorable conditions for their cultural survival and revival, there are publishing houses and theaters in all of the four countries where the Sami live (in the North of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, where their traditional homeland is now situated). NILs-ASLAK VALKEAPAA (1943-2001) The most recent grand Sami master, Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, was versed in many languages and cultures (e.g., North Sami, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English). He was highly knowledgeable about his own indigenous tradition but also familiar with many other traditions and contemporary cultural practices around the world, including indigenous and non-indigenous, ancient, modern, and postmodern. Endowed with excellent social skills, as well as multiple talents as a writer, painter, composer, actor, and performing artist, he managed to form stable artistic relationships with a handful of other people in order to pioneer new Sami artistic forms and bring them to a position of global visibility by the beginning of the twenty-first century. At ease with verbal, musical, and theatrical performance and improvisation, he partook in several kinds of ritualistic events around the globe, be it a Native American tribal ceremony, a literary festival in Oslo, or performing with shakuhachi flute performers in Japan. Valkeapaa’s visits to Japan started in 1988, when he read his poems and sang yoiks at a literary performance of Nordic authors in a Noh theater hall in Tokyo. His performance was very well received by the Japanese audience, and this formed the basis of a lifelong connection to Japan. Cultivating close friendships with Japanese experts in his home country helped Valkeapaa to extend his insights into different Japanese artistic and spiritual traditions, mainly 73.
