YELLOWKNIFE, Northwest Territories — The immersive stage drama “Kiuryaq”, a co-production of Akpik Theatre and the Toronto-based company Theaturtle, debuted at the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre in what the production is calling a showcase wrapped around the Northern Lights that connects audiences with circumpolar Indigenous stories from Canada, Greenland and Sápmi, Sept. 20, 2025.
Northern Lights dominate in an immersive circumpolar play.
In the official synopsis, Theaturtle explains “Kiuryaq” as “an immersive circumpolar theatre performance that explores our relationship with the Northern Lights,” combining theatre, a live string quartet, and large-format film projections into one multi-disciplinary offering. In Inuvialuktun, kiuryaq is another name for the aurora, and rather than abstract lights that linger, distracting in the background of a shot (as they sometimes do even in otherwise well-made movies), they are depicted as something quite alive, propelling the action.
It will focus on two siblings, born in the North: an older sister who was raised under the glow of the Northern Lights with her grandparents, and a younger brother believed to have been forced adopted down south and who never knew his home community. As the aurora dances above them, their paths turn toward each other once more, with questions of kinship, dislocation, and decisions made when people’s worlds collide coming to the surface.
“Kiuryaq” is the product of several years of story-sharing among northern artists and knowledge keepers from Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Sámi territories, and it’s intended to be scalable from large concert halls to community centres, planetariums, and even what Boyer called the “snow amphitheatre.” Its mix of live music, spoken word, Indigenous languages, and digital media attempts to emulate the ethereal, unpredictable movement of the Northern Lights themselves.
A Tradition of Northern Lights Storytelling With a legacy to build on
As “Kiuryaq” makes its way to the stage, it stakes its claim among the many artists who have sought meaning in the Northern Lights. The National Film Board’s documentary “The Northern Lights” combined animated legends and interviews with Indigenous communities and scientists to explain aurora narratives to a wide public.
And earlier, APTN News reported on how the Northern Lights can be recast as a protective, even avenging force in “Kwêskosîw (She Whistles),” a thriller about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. And in 2023, the National Film Board emphasised the rising influence of northern creators by showcasing Indigenous and Arctic stories at the Available Light Film Festival in Whitehorse, a federal news release said. Together, those projects sketch a certain line of continuity that “Kiuryaq” now threads into live performance.
Exhibition footage to showcase Northern Light stories to the South
And according to the Akpik Theatre tour overview, “Kiuryaq” will journey to other northern Canadian communities before crossing the Arctic Ocean to Nuuk, Greenland, and on to Guovdageaidnu for a performance at the Sámi National Theatre in Norway. The company intends to offer versions ranging from large concert halls to small school gyms so that communities that live with the Northern Lights, “as many of us live with rain,” are among the first to see the show.
In the South, a residency and performance at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver is set to be one of that production’s Canadian city stops, with co-presentation by PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in early 2026. Producers claim the mission is to bring northern stories to audiences who recognise the aurora more as a tourism spectacle than an eternal source of ancestral teachings, and to introduce them to a worldview built on ice, stars and community instead of postcards and package tours.
By the time “Kiuryaq” travels through Canada and around the circumpolar North, its creators describe the work as part celebratory and part alarm: a chance to laugh, mourn and listen beneath the Northern Lights at a moment when questions of climate, extraction and cultural survival have become more pressing. By merging Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and focusing on northern communities on and offstage, the drama points to how aurora narratives are moving from the edges to the middle of Canada’s cultural conversation.
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