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Dancing has the power to connect communities from across the world. Last week, two dance groups — one from Unalakleet and one from Chicago — met in Nome in an effort to blend contemporary and Alaska Native dance styles.
Amber Cunningham is one of the cofounders of Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak, Inupiaq for Unalakleet Comes To Life.
The dance group was founded in 2022, after more than a century without traditional dance in the community. Cunningham explained by 1915, dance and other cultural practices had been banned in Unalakleet.
“All of us would watch dance, and we just yearn for it,” she said, reflecting back to attending Quyana Night events during AFN. “Opportunities that just come up where we can [collaborate] with other groups is really, really cool.”
Unalakleet Comes To Life took to the stage on Thursday alongside Winifred Haun & Dancers, a contemporary dance group based in Chicago. It was the grand finale of the Nome Dance Project, a weeklong collaborative effort blending contemporary and Alaska Native dance styles.
The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts with support from the Nome Arts Council. Thursday night was their grand finale.
Winifred Haun, founder of Winifred Haun & Dancers said she feels many dancers share similar life philosophies, no matter where they come from.
“My art form of contemporary dance, it's so open and fluid and flaky. It encompasses everything from ballet to hippy dippy modern dance, and I feel like I can just borrow from everybody,” she explained. “It fascinates me, how to take something and break it down to its essence. I feel like that's what Native Alaskan dance does.”
On stage at Nome Elementary School, each dancer’s fluid movements fell in line with Cunningham’s drum beats during the night's final performance.
Though thousands of miles normally separate the two groups, there seems to be a special connection between them. Haun said they’ve learned a lot from one another through the project.
“There's a history, a terrible history of you know white people coming in and saying, ‘Here, let me save you. I'll help you. I'll help you with your dance form,’ and that's definitely not what we're trying to do," she explained. “I just want to learn their dance form just like to understand it and do it and watch it. That was my artistic reason for this."
This rare opportunity to dance alongside one another, Cunningham said, has been a confidence boost for herself and the young dancers who took part in the project.
“It's actually pretty cool that we get the opportunity to be heard,” Cunningham said. “Initially we're told, ‘No, you cannot dance’, and now they're asking us to dance, and we're like okay, cool. Let's go. Let's work together. Let's do this.”
