Review: Special Night

HDC is one of the longest-running contemporary dance groups in Finland. It was officially founded in 1973 under the name of the Helsinki City Theatre’s dance company. Even before this, the theatre had trained theatre dancers, and the dancers had performed in their own dance performances in addition to musicals.

HDC has a strong, multi-stage and diverse history behind it, and its choreographers have been several significant domestic and foreign artists. The group has also undeniably influenced the development of Finnish contemporary dance.

The choreography of the SPECIAL NIGHT jubilee performance is made by the multi-award-winning, Slovakian-born Anton Lachky, who currently ranks at the absolute top of European contemporary dance.

And the festive performance is quite special. The stage image created by William Iles for the main stage of the City Theatre is already magnificent: plenty of dark, corrugated velvet curtains and no less than five large crystal chandeliers, which are also used as atmospheric lighting elements. Not to mention the screens that open up in the background, where dreamily beautiful videos made by Toni Haaranen move from the universe to the bottom of the sea. There is also festivity and glitter in Maria Rosenqvist’s mainly black and white outfits with a touch of blue and gold, which, despite their showiness, can easily be moved with ease.

But this is just a festive setting. Nothing would be anything without dance and movement. And it certainly is, to the point of breathlessness. Lachky’s movement language is extremely energetic, physically extremely demanding, and often so fast-paced that even the gaze has trouble keeping up.

Dancers, on the other hand, do not. The dance group, consisting of its own people and visitors, with a total of 11 members, is absolutely unbelievably magnificent. They cope with the spectacular, technically difficult choreography brilliantly. In addition to sparkling dance, they even have expression and frenzied presence for the audience.The content of Special Night is a surreal journey into the power of imagination and dream. And that’s what the performance really is. In the movement language, you can spot the familiar movement phrases of erotic show dance or proper disco beat, implemented with a pinch of satire. The sea anemone, created mainly by their feet, is also fairytale-like by Aksinja Lommi, Heidi Naakka, Krista-Julia Arppo and Ioulia Zacharak. But the intention is not to find any more serious message from the performance, only the joy of dance, movement and living.

The music for all this movement is an impressive compilation by Jaakko Virmavirta, in which tight percussion songs and techno intersect and merge with church singing and even snippets of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff’s compositions.

Special Night is a performance that celebrates both the magnificent Helsinki Dance Company and the power of dance itself in a tight package of less than an hour.