Chevak Tanqik member Cody Pequeño had the Cama’i crowd in stitches as he gesticulated wildly at the center of the stage, smoothing out his qaspeq and preening himself.
As Pequeño explained after the performance, the song is about getting ready for a night of yuraq.
"What are you doing tonight? I'm gonna go dancing," Pequeño said.
While many of the dances at the Cama’i Dance Festival are a window into the distant past, Pequeño said that this one was written around a decade ago by Chevak resident Allen Ulroan.
"All the songs we sing are all composed by Chevak dancers back home. Some are new, some are old, some are borrowed," Pequeño said.
Over the years, the community has gained a reputation for serving up high-energy performances in their Cama’i appearances. The current leader of Chevak Tanqik, Anthony Boyscout, said that he remembers it always being this way.
"I like it that way, dancing hard, moving," Boyscout said. "I learned that from back when I was in school, when the Elders, my Elders, before they all passed away, they used to really drum and I'd be sweating while dancing."
Tanqik translates roughly as “bright light,” and the dance group traces its roots back to the 1980s, when it was formed by Elder John Pingayak as the Tanqik Theater dance group. It was part of a cultural heritage program launched by Pingayak through the local school district to preserve and pass on Cup’ik values.
Boyscout was himself an early member of Pingayak’s group and remembers him as a mentor.
"I asked him several times, 'how do we make songs?' I was in high school. And he said to me, when you go out hunting just to listen to the sky and listen to the wind, listen to the birds, and a song will come to you," Boyscout said.
As a teenager, Boyscout had the rare opportunity to leave his village of fewer than 1,000 people and perform with Tanqik Theater at cultural festivals far and wide.
"He brought me to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji back then when I was in school," Boyscout said.
Boyscout said that lessons learned early on from Pingayak about the power of dance have carried him through both good times and bad.
"It built me up and it pushed me to do better. It pushed me to teach. It pushed me to go forward and give it all we got," Boyscout said.
Today, Boyscout teaches Cup’ik language alongside his wife at the Chevak School, where he said that the Chevak Tanqik dancers practice every day. Now in his third year leading the dance group, he said that his focus is on passing the torch to the next generation.
"A lot of kids like to dance. They ask me a lot when they're going to dance again. And I want to teach the young kids how to sing. And that's my goal right now," Boyscout said.
While the Chevak dancers don’t currently have any plans to appear in the South Pacific, on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, they are likely to remain a familiar sight.
