Review: Bonfire: The Wandering Bands Of Storytelling Sapiens

Ima Iduozee’s choreography is intelligent and powerful – Bonfire burns like a flame of life

This is exactly what performing arts should be: bold, expressive and experiential.

Helsinki Dance Company’s Bonfire: The wandering bands of storytelling sapiens glued me to the bench at Studio Pasila for at least an hour. It’s good that I remembered to breathe.

Choreographer Ima Iduozee’s movement language is very expressive. As a dancer, Iduozee has been awarded, among other things, with the Critic’s Spurs for her expression, which has its roots in breakdance. As a choreographer, she also brings the explosive energy of street dance into the movement language of her dancers.

In a videotaped interview, Iduozee reminds us that the purpose of art is not only to produce experiences, but also to educate people. It’s bold talk from a young artist.

At least I was attracted to Bonfire by the clear train of thought that ran like a red thread behind all the presentation. During the performance, which lasted only an hour, a brief history of humanity from beginning to end, the meaning of life and the key symbols of the religious foundation of our culture were discussed.

Iduozee has taken its mission of educating its audience and broadening the viewers’ worldview seriously.

According to my own interpretation, neither cavemen nor scouts sit at the campfire telling stories in the performance. The bonfire of the performance is the fire that burns inside each of us, the question of the joy of living and the compulsion to live. The desire to live is the most powerful genetic compulsion of the inner forces that guide us. Bonfire is life itself, eternal fire.

I don’t know if Iduozee was influenced by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Man.In any case, in the beginning, the same kind of grassy plain was used all the way to the name of the dance piece.

In Harari’s opinion, one of the biggest mistakes of humanity was the transition from a gathering economy to agriculture.

The view of Iduozee and his ensemble is also fundamentally pessimistic. Perhaps they have wanted to say that our biggest mistake is that we are unable to see the consequences of our actions.

At the beginning of the play, the first person is born into the world blind like a kitten. Justus Pienmunne, who danced wonderfully, popped from under the curtain onto the stage of the history of Earth’s biodiversity wearing sunglasses. Pienmunne also wore sunglasses in the show’s stunningly fine final scene, where humanity disappeared from the face of the earth.

Bonfire was a work of art made by the community. The physicality of the dance only accentuated this feeling. Ville Kabrell’s compositions and the soundscape he created for the performance went hand in hand with Iduozee’s powerful movement language. The scenography of Erno Aaltonen and Laura Väinölä was elegantly simplistic. Aaltonen’s lighting design gave the performance the conditions in which people have told each other stories after sunset in the light of campfires.

The performance also used speech and singing in an open-minded manner. The performance began with a scene in which Sofia Hilli described the circumstances in which humans as a species were born. Inka Tiitinen sang a wonderful aria for eternity. A cacophony depicting the birth of cultures was conjured up from the voices emitted by the actors with the help of frontal microphones and an echo effect.