Review: Kaksivärinen fuuga
A two-colour fugue is a gentle nightmare In
his new work, Carl Knif shows a deep understanding of the nuances of movement and atmosphere. When you look at a two-color fugue, you never know what will happen next, but when something happens, you accept it as the only option.
White, grey, a little black. In the middle, a table with a microphone stand on top. From the start, the discreetly stylish stage is distantly threatening, like a minimalist design store where you wander around in the middle of the night without knowing exactly why.
When the audience still flows into the auditorium of Studio Pasila, two dancers dressed in grey begin an interactive “motion mirroring”. One leads the slow movement on the table wrapped around the microphone stand, the other follows. They are looking for something in common – some connection.
The role of the proudly standing microphone stand changes when the work actually begins and Dmitri Shostakovich’s piano music bursts into the space. The rack disappears from its static position on the table and loses its dominant position. It becomes a tool, a medium, a glue between the dancers. In place of the stand, a large branch is brought to the table, which also affects the dynamics between the dancers.
During the next hour, various items are purposefully transported to and from the stage. The dancers carry out this logistics with due seriousness, as if there is a reason for everything that just doesn’t open up outside the stage world. Choreographer Carl Knif has previously delighted with his far-reaching approach to his works, utilising subtle deadpan humour. This kind of silent comedy is born from the fact that everyone, all the time, is very serious.
Now Knif is taking a couple of steps further. The Two-Colour Fugue , which has matured stronger since the cancelled premiere of the coronavirus spring, is not funny at all, and therefore it is really funny in a way that remains smoldering after the work is finished. In its peculiar strangeness, the work is very sure of itself and its progression.
And it deserves to be: the co-production of Carl Knif Company and Helsinki Dance Company is internally flawless and completely controlled in terms of atmosphere, movement language and structure. Enigmatic but logical in its own world, The Two-Color Fugue is a rare combination of extreme coolness and total wildness. It constantly surprises the viewer, but once it’s over, nothing could have been different.
***
The two-colour fugue progresses with the help of overlapping scenes. It moves by means of reactions, mirroring and imitation. As the work progresses, the initial posture experiments are refined into more demanding movement sequences, in which the dancers take turns in the role of either a follower or a follower. Often, the leader, or at least the one who arouses the interest of others, is the one who has carried one of the objects carried to the stage, such as a branch, a pipe or a jacket.
In the comprehensive movement language developed by Knif, you can see influences from at least Taiji and occasionally also ballet, i.e. styles that are particularly based on the control of the body and mind. The roundness and softness familiar from Taiji are combined with firm, angular and repetitive movements. The lines of the long extended limbs are broken, and the movement, which mainly remains low, is repetitive, but takes you forward all the time.
In the two-colour fugue , the greatest impression is made by the movement language, which feels ancient and precise. As if it had rules that are hundreds or thousands of years old and its own will. The dancers who play brilliantly together – Jonna Aaltonen, Jyrki Kasper, Pekka Louhio, Heidi Naakka, Mikko Paloniemi, Anna Stenberg and Eero Vesterinen – have thoroughly embraced the nuances of movement and live the strange world of the stage as if nothing else existed. Above all, however, the two-colour fugue is a whole that has been honed into just the right shape both on the surface and deeper. All the parts of the work work, and they work together.
Carl Knif has used Dmitri Shostakovich’s fugues and preludes as the starting point for the choreography. Shostakovich, who also wrote a lot of dance and film music during his career, composed 24 fugues and preludes that were usually thought of as “not danceable” in 1951–52. It says something about Knif’s way of working and vision that he has tackled them.
A fugue is a form of composition consisting of several independent voices, usually based on a single theme; The prelude, on the other hand, is a prelude, an introduction. These compositions by Shostakovich sound like an avalanche in many places, but at the same time just the way Knif’s work as a whole feels, strong and inevitable.
With the help of Janne Hasti’s successful sound design, the avalanche is broken with varying soundscapes. The remix parts of the music as well as the silences and hums that are part of the work offer a respite. There are several different phases and moods in the work, but danger is present even when the music does not really refer to it. Who is calling and whom? At times, the impression is that music, or that music is produced with objects, bodies, or movements, or that music takes place in invisible spaces between them.
***
Even though The Two-Colour Fugue , which has abandoned textual or theme-based approaches, has no actual plot, you constantly want to know more while watching it. It’s as if a mystery is just about to be solved, but the parties to the mystery are still a mystery in themselves. At times, the work seems like some kind of teasing of meaning, the cavalcade of objects brought to the stage is a hilarious parody of symbols. For dancers, however, things are real at all times, they are enough on their own. Mirrors, frames and jackets are used to reveal, delineate and protect.
Some of the objects change their appearance during the work, change into others. Towards the end, when the objects are pulled to heaven in an “elevator” assembled from two tables, they represent the same object as a moment ago, but are still slightly different from before. For example, the wig and plastic bag brought to the elevator are probably different versions of their predecessors that represent the same function. They try hard to get rid of something with the help of an elevator, but the task is a little wrong.
The two-colour fugue also successfully plays with the conventions of performance art, such as the boundary between the auditorium and the stage, as well as the practices of clapping. It is downright unbelievable that there is yet another new angle to the deconstruction of these worn-out subjects. It is in this work that the utilisation of liminal spaces and boundary zones works, as the work leaks beyond its edges and boundaries anyway. This is evidenced by the duet danced on Louhio’s and Vesterinen’s table, which constantly threatens to fall from the mini-stage inside the stage to the actual stage – which is also just one of many stages inside the “real” stage, the outside world.
In a two-colour fugue, things are recognizable in this way, but unfamiliar. That’s why watching the work feels like following a stranger’s nightmare. And it’s the other person’s nightmare that’s enjoyable to watch. There is no way of knowing where everything comes from, but there is a suitable distance to frightening events, and therefore they can be observed with joy.
All the technical and artistic elements, from lighting to costumes, move in some way between day and night, everyday life and a terrifying party. According to the basic doctrines of the fugue, these elements run separately, but intertwine with each other, are connected. The occasional dream figures dressed in black and frightening in a cinematic way with hats belong to the same work as everyday winter coats.
Yes, those winter coats. Day, everyday life, shelter – protection from the night, from nightmares, from oneself. When Eero Vesterinen is finally left lying under a pile of coats and the lighting turns yellowish like daylight, I wonder if I really have to put on my own jacket and leave. I would like to stay in the familiar dream of a stranger, the progress of which I cannot predict, but whose logic of action still seems more credible than everyday reality.