One of the best things about living in Calgary is how easy it is to get away from Calgary. The Rockies are a short (and affordable) bus ride away … and nestled in those mountains is a hub for the arts, where you, as an audience member, can be a part of the creative process.
People got one such chance on December 16, 2025, when Canadian Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq opened a rehearsal for the show Split Tooth: Saputjiji to the public at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. This show — which is set to formally open at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival on February 5, 2025 — is an abstract mix of visuals, live music, and throat singing that pulls heavily from Tagaq’s book Split Tooth and her new album, Saputjij. Directed by boundary-breaking opera and theatre artist Kaneza Schaal, this show merges Tagaq’s vocal landscapes with staging that blurs “music and memory, landscape and breath, body and cosmos.”
Stepping into the theatre, it was hard not to feel the walls between performer and audience break down. The “open rehearsal” format feels inherently intimate, as does the Jenny Belzberg Theatre, which seemed to swell and shift its walls in relation to the primordial sounds onstage. After a 75-ish minute performance, a lively Q&A hosted by Schaal followed with the creative team, which includes throat-singing duo Silla (Cynthia Pitsiulak and Charlotte Qamaniq) and various family members of Tagaq.
At the Banff Centre, this kind of behind-the-scenes look is done regularly. In January 2025, Mahabharata: The Journey Begins from Toronto’s why not theatre opened its rehearsal doors to the public in Banff before embarking on a year of touring. It’s a format that allows Albertans to experience shows that would otherwise skip the region, and to talk with the artists about the creative process. And between the cheap tickets and on-site hotels (which have a cool, The Shining feel in the wintertime), it makes for a relatively inexpensive and unique way to be a tourist in your own province.
Relive Split Tooth below, and start planning a detour to the Banff Centre on your next mountainous excursion.
All photos by Rita Taylor, courtesy of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
All captions by Nathan Iles.
