Review: Bonfire: The Wandering Bands Of Storytelling Sapiens

A Psychedelic Dream About the Evolution of the Human Tribe

Helsinki Dance Company’s spring premiere, Ima Iduozee’s Bonfire: The Wandering Bands of Storytelling Sapiens, brings stunning visuals, magical music and skilled dancers to the stage of Studio Pasila. What it all means is as ambiguous as the title of the work.

For me, the performance was a psychedelic dream, a fragmentary fantasy about the evolution of humanity from the dawn of time to the present day and from there to eternity. And as Inka Tiitinen says in Iduozee’s song Ikuisuuden, we don’t know the direction, but let’s go there together.

Being together and a sense of community is one of the themes that runs through the performance in general. Although the six-member tribe clearly consists of individuals with their own aspirations, the most important thing is to be together and support each other. Whether it’s just wondering watching or concrete physical movement.

Painterly Video Visualization

Although movement is important in the performance, the videos designed by Erno Aaltonen and Iduozee that can be seen in two large “windows” become the most important. Their changing colour saturation and brushstroke-like patterns are reminiscent of expressive paintings. In my opinion, their continuous movement is also the fire of the campfire that the name of the performance refers to.

The same endless versatility can also be found in the music created by Ville Kabrell, which occasionally flirts with electronic music. As well as Aaltonen’s lighting design, which breathes in the rhythm of the music.

If the colors and movement of the videos are the basic energy of the performance, then the soundscape is a safe blanket that surrounds the dancers.

A touch of absurd madness is brought in by Laura Väinölä’s costumes, which play with tulle and satin, but are also plain nude.

In this ensemble, the dancers have the space and freedom to create Iduozee’s choreography, which is both small-scale and comprehensive. The movement is alive, startles and vibrates in the dancers’ bodies. The movement language is reminiscent of the delicate and instinctive movement of animals without being in any way really “animalistic”. Each of the group’s six skilled dancers takes turns to be the soloist and focuses the viewer’s attention only on themselves, but the most important thing is still the community, which they always return to in the end.

Bonfire is a dreamlike, moving tapestry of stories that at the end quite concretely fades away like a dream when you wake up.