Review: HDC2
The two new works of the Helsinki City Theatre dance troupe feature experienced nostalgia and young strength.
The collective name Helsinki Dance Company to the power of two encompasses two very different dance works. Norwegian Ina Christel Johannessen’s Something Spooked the Horses creates an atmosphere of memories on stage, while the younger generation Simo Kellokumpu’s Daydream Junkies takes the audience into a rhythmic world of thirst for life and the urge to die.
Something Spooked the Horses is a densely atmospheric work by Johannessen (b. 1959). You don’t see or hear horses on stage, but the name refers to the atmosphere that the experienced choreographer has wanted to create in the work. She has used improvisation to create the work and created her vision of the skilled dancers’ own movements. The end result is a work of powerful presence by three dancers. In the midst of the reddish chrysanthemums, Sofia Hilli, Jenni-Elina Lehto and Valtteri Raekallio dance emotionally and throw themselves into it.
Instead of a dance piece, it feels like watching scenes from a black-and-white movie of the past. Each viewer is allowed to create the story of the work in their minds, Johannessen gives it plenty of stimuli and images, but no clear plot. In intertwined scenes, the dancers listen to the world around them and each other. They seem to sense like horses, listening sensitively, but they look directly at each other, see and react to each other’s dance.
Jukka Huitila’s lighting adds to the cinematic atmosphere. The colours disappear from the stage and even the red flowers turn brownish, as if they were faded greetings from the past.
In the work of six dancers by Simo Kellokumpu (b. 1972), thoughts of life and death meet. Before the premiere, Kellokumpu said that the starting point for Daydream Junkies was to communicate inner moods, not to depict the world that emerges from the outside.
The dancers’ inner feelings come alive as they marvel at life through their eyelashes-like blinking fingers. They often swap clothes with each other, as if to experiment with what it would be like to live in each other’s skin.
The stage design is simplistic, Jukka Hutila’s lightboxes hang close to the dancers and illuminate the empty white dance mat. The movement of the dancers starts with small rhythmic shoulder raises and grows into high leg lifts. In the style familiar from Kellokumpu’s previous works, sometimes we are like in a disco or a nightclub, sometimes in the drug-fueled dreams of drug addicts.
Heidi Naakka and guest dancer Sofia Karlsson are the sensual women in the work, whose ornately moving hands seduce us. The fast-paced dance of four men includes high leg lifts and low floor-level spins. In addition to the dance group Unto Nuora, Mikko Lampinen and Mikko Paloniemi , the performance features guest dancer Jarkko Mandelin, who has replaced Kai Lähdesmäki, who is suffering from a knee injury, in a short time.
In the dance of life, death seems to win in the end. In the final picture, the other dancers are holding Mandelin high in the air, who, draped with a loincloth, glides across the stage, in the position of a crucified man.