Review: (re)use

Back to the future of dance

The first issue of the new comprehensive Finnish trade magazine Teatteri&Tanssi includes an article that questions the traditional performance and reception of performing arts (in a theatre with a stage and stands). The idea is that younger generations who have become accustomed to other types of user interfaces can no longer or do not want to receive “one-sided, authoritarian delivered artwork from a frontal and passive receiving position”. Kenneth Kvarnström’s new (re)use for Helsinki Dance Company is basically “one-sided, authoritarianly delivered art”, but he gives the recipient new opportunities when he – consciously and highly successfully – distances himself from the frontal delivery towards the gallery.

In (re)use, the viewer is in a way on a tour of Kenneth Kvarnström’s scenic world. The production is performance-like or happening-like when the audience stand has been dismantled and the audience and dancers share the same stage with installation-like and significant objects and sporadically scattered chairs and benches around the flanks to sit down on. Initially, we are tempted to freely swarm around the stages and see the dancers and the dance as close as we want or manage to get. Later, we become outside or enclosed in the event when the curtain divides the space and makes different groups see different scenes. It is titillatingly effective and of course makes some people wedge over to the other side or stand at the boundary line and look in both directions.

In the scenes that are shared together, we are repeatedly asked to move and change places. This creates completely new perspectives and perspectives on the choreographic material, which consists entirely in harmony with the title of the work consisting of recycled scenes from Kenneth Kvarnström’s extensive production – and of new material based on or around them. If you have been there before, you get a feeling of reliving worlds you have visited or taken part in. Now you spend time in them in a new way and with a different commitment as a result of the changing local perspective.

In the changeable stage material are the particularly delicious and suggestively rhythmic elbow dances from Blodsängel (1994) and no-no (1996), which now, as then, etch themselves into the mind and spinal cord. The nightmare vision from Destruction Song (2008), with its bearskin trousers, body painting and tough incitement with a humorous undertone, is given a new and particularly effective version by Kai Lähdesmäki, Janne Marja-aho and Terhi Vaimala. What you won’t soon forget is Kenneth Bruun Carlson’s and Sofia Karlsson’s concentratedly grotesque and butolic-like expressive interpretation of the knife scene from “… that was all I wanted, so I stuck my finger in his eye…” (1991) as the conclusion of the work.

Between the clear quotations there are lots of finely flowing and detailed couple and trio dances. In it, you play with gravity, friction and flow in interwoven formations with a characteristic choreographic craftsmanship and a solid interpretation of the five dancers in different combinations and, of course, costumes.
(re)use is a fine end to Kenneth Kvarnström’s leadership of HDC and a new turn towards the freelance field and possibly towards a new aesthetic and production.