Review: HDC2
Bizarre trio creates friction
The City Theatre’s dance group, Helsinki Dance Company, has the principle of inviting guest choreographers and commissioning them to create new works for the ensemble.
In recent years, they have boldly given budding domestic talents the chance to create new works for the country’s most established and, one might add, best-resourced contemporary dance group. Simo Kellokumpu now joins the series Arja Tiili and Jenni Kivelä. Alongside him, Ina Christel Johannessen, one of Norway’s most famous contemporary choreographers, has been invited for a double evening called HDC2.
During the Dance Festival in November, it was possible to see how impressions from other art forms and forms of stage production can even marginalise dance and movement. In HDC2 , you can take the damage again. What Kellokumpu’s and Johannessen’s works have in common is that they rely entirely on dance and movement and on the impressions conveyed through them. They do this to the extent that no keys in the form of text about, for example, themes, starting points or goals are served in the program leaflet. The field is thus free for the viewer to form their own opinions. If you find this difficult or reluctant, you can in any case enjoy an interpretation and stage performance of the very best quality.
Black humor
The set design of Simo Kellokumpu’s Daydream Junkies, designed by Jukka Huitila, is sterile and minimalistic, graphically black and white and greyish. It in itself makes the stage action allegorical enough to include events that at times can be thought of as shared and at times parallel, at times fantasy and at times reality.
The six protagonists, four men and two women, on stage all seem to be out to get maximum kicks. However, whether they get them from each other, together or individually in a group, is quite open. Quite often I get the impression that the latter is the case in a ravelic context.
Kellokumpu’s movement sequences, which repeatedly form effective unison patterns, are clearly chiseled but fluid, rhythmic and soft. They grow up in high leg lifts – in whipping developpés or pointing arabesques – with the associated elated arm movement. The movement material is not particularly distinct or innovative, but the comics and the scenes between them presented in other ways create a dense atmosphere. With the scenography and music as support, a strong and highly contemporary image of escape from reality is born.
Ina Christel Johannessen’s Something Spooked The Horses is both a peculiar and highly ambiguous work in its mood and constellation. Black humour prevails in the bizarre and anguished world of the three dancers, lined with lots of bottles each with a gerbera in it. Jukka Huitila has also designed the stage and lighting in this work, which takes on nightmarish shifts in neon yellow and green as the surrealism blossoms to its fullest.
Triangle drama?
On stage, a man (Valtteri Raekallio), a mature woman (Sofia Hilli) and a young woman (Jenni-Elina Lehto) act nervously and without anything but passing contact. The constellation invites reading as a triangle drama in promises and betrayals, as well as in relationships that are not fulfilled but instead create friction and frustration. However, the whole thing is presented in a very allegorical and changeable way, so that you as a spectator can never be completely sure of your case. An extra moment of tension or friction is added towards the end when a bottle is thrown on the floor and the dancers act barefoot among the shards.
Escape from reality and relationship problems, Helsinki Dance Company shows that many thoughts about these existential phenomena can be awakened through dance and movement.