Dancer’s speech
As the dance group of the Helsinki City Theatre turns 50 this year, my own professional career as a dancer is twenty years old. Of those 20 years, I have danced in the ranks of a dance company for 16. With the exception of the birth of my two children and one six-month working holiday with an artist grant, days, weeks, months and years have passed here. The home of my professional identity is here, in the dance group of the Helsinki City Theatre.
Since I am from Kainuu and have completed my vocational training in Turku and Stockholm, the City Theatre’s dance group was still a relatively foreign concept to me at the turn of the 2000s. At the Turku Arts Academy, there were students from Helsinki in my class, and through them I heard praise for the works of Kenneth Kvarnström , the director of the dance group at the time, and about the wonderfully skilled and charismatic dancers. Since I was still growing my professional aspirations in terms of dance, I didn’t think that a dance group would be something that would be written as a decisive chapter in my life. However, after four years as a freelancer, in the spring of 2006, the director of the dance group at the time, Ville Sormunen , asked me to be a guest in the coming spring’s performance, and the following autumn I was hired as a dancer in the dance group. With deep gratitude, I remember the late Ville Ring and the gift he gave me and my dancing skills with this dancer engagement.
The dance group of the Helsinki City Theatre is a place where there is certainly the best possible setting to focus on the work of a dancer. It has been possible to practice the profession of a dancer here for 50 years! There have been phases and battles have been needed, but movement and dance are still alive and well under the protection of the theatre. A deep bow to all those who have had the strength to fight for dance! Here, the dancer can come to work, go to the morning class and then focus on the dancer’s task at hand. At the end of the day, she can throw her dirty workout clothes in the laundry basket to be washed, say goodbye to the smiling face in the theatre centre and leave knowing that tomorrow I will be able to do what I love the most. It is a privileged position and enables many things to grow both as a dancer and as a performer. When you don’t have to constantly look for a job, worry about your livelihood in the coming months and justify your need and right to dance, you have quite a lot more mental and physical capital left for making art.
The freedom to focus on making dance and the diverse field of performing in which dancers do their work in this theatre enable a very unique path in growing as a performer. There is probably no task that a dancer would not be believed to perform on stage. When you simultaneously create a musical spectacle on a large stage and an intimate dance piece based on a specific movement language on a small stage, the dancer has to use a relatively large spectrum from his toolbox. Sometimes it’s really hard, but all those who have wanted to stay here as dancers have seen the above as an opportunity.
When I look at my fellow dancers in their multifaceted dancers, I see that the dance group is growing into iron professionals in performance with special performance quality. Their dancing has been carved so many times and according to many wishes and works that they feel the sound of their bodies with a special sensitivity. That’s why you can tell a dancer on stage even when everyone is just standing still. These dancers and performers are a capital for the theatre, and I believe that this theatre will also understand its value in the future.
I don’t know of any other theatre where the work of an ensemble dancer can be done in a dance group at the City Theatre. Building successive works between the same dancers is an opportunity that the dancer feels but also sees. The deepening of the connection on many levels from work to work is inevitable. It is a special opportunity for a choreographer to have dancers who have sweated together for hundreds of hours, breathed on each other’s skin, insisted and agreed on numerous movements and counted thousands of times together to eight. Dancers who know each other’s most beautiful successes and life events as well as the darkest phases. The ensemble work of the dancers at the City Theatre is in many ways a cultural act. Be that as it may, it will never go away!
Everything that has been done here has merged into me into what I am as a dancer and as a person now. I have been able to marvel at movement under the guidance of numerous wonderful choreographers and immerse myself in the worlds that choreographers and directors have wanted to make visible through my works. How I enjoy every time the moment when the production starts to take on a life of its own. When after everything has been set, the work begins to breathe with its own lungs, when the invisible becomes visible and the art takes place. For me as a dancer, it’s a sacred place, I haven’t gotten closer to myself anywhere yet.
I think that our lives are very much determined by the people we spend our time with here. At the City Theatre, the dancer belongs to the performers’ tribe among the actors and musicians and, together with all those engaged in artistic work, to the artists’ tribe. Everyone who does their work here is the Helsinki City Theatre, and in my experience, we all wear that hat with pride. I got to choose this job and these people, and I look at them all with gratitude and deep respect. Such a multi-coloured environment is inspiring for all of us, and in many ways a rich soil is growing, both as people and as artists, in the direction we choose.
Heidi Naakka