Different perspectives on contact and physical dialogue
The joint evening will feature three works that deal with contact in different ways.
“The invited choreographers all work from different starting points. During the evening, you can see the works of three stylistically different artists,” says Antti Lahti, Director of Helsinki Dance Company.
The dancers of Helsinki Dance Company will perform Mirva Mäkinen’s Luodos and Sari Palmgren’s Soidinmeno. The third will be Riia Kivimäki’s and Saku Mäkelä’s duet GLG, which will be produced in collaboration with Cirko – Center for New Circus.
“We wanted Riga and Saku to join us because their work combines contemporary circus, acrobatics and dance in a personal way. I have wanted to collaborate with different groups and organizations as much as possible. It opens up different perspectives on your own work,” Lahti says.
The exceptional circumstances that have lasted for almost two years have been one of the reasons for the creation of the evening. “The theme was based on the fundamental idea that a dancer’s work can never move from a rehearsal hall to a remote meeting,” Lahti says.
Lahti thinks that the art of dance has a lot to offer to think about everything we have had to adapt to over the past two years.
Physical Interpretation of Meanings
Mirva Mäkinen’s Luodos is a tapestry of three dancers and one musician that explores the formation and dissolution of the meanings of physical contact.
At the beginning of the process, Mäkinen studied with the dancers the signs of the runic scripts used in the Iron Age and the process of creating meaning. “At times, the runes appeared as human figures, drawings, signposts. The characters drawn on the runestones can suggest many different things,” Mäkinen says.
In his doctoral dissertation, the Swedish researcher Marco Bianchi has shown that the runes on the Viking runestones did not always have content, but were also written as proof of the writer’s writing skills, even if it did not exist.
In this work, too, the meanings of situations can mean many different things. As the dancers’ physical dialogue progresses, the viewer can observe the formation and unravelling of meanings as a free association.
“It’s an ode to meanings and at the same time a whisper to the unimaginable in its bud,” Mäkinen describes.
Contact improvisation, which is used as the movement material of the work, refers to a physical dialogue with two or more people. The movement of dancers is in relation to physical laws, such as gravity, speed of movement and friction.
The training involves following the point of contact, supporting the other person’s body weight and giving the body weight to the dance partner. Rolling, rolling, falling and being upside down together are part of the basic technique related to contact.
The work uses various improvisational structures as part of the exercises, such as contact and the resulting experiences of connection and separation, or even surprising twists and turns in reality and illusion.
“The sonic and physical dialogue between the musician and the dancers is experiential knowledge that reaches into the inner space of the body, and at the same time full of opportunities for misunderstanding,” Mäkinen says.
See me!
Many of Sari Palmgren’s works deal with the relationship with nature, the change in the environment, and the relationship and similarity between humans and animals – including Soidinmenot.
The work is based on the idea of a bird that calls its mate alone endlessly without getting a response, because the others are already extinct. “This is the undertone, but the performance is not about birds, but about people,” Palmgren says.
In the rehearsals, the dancers have searched for their own inner bird, for example, with the help of bird metamorphosis. “We are all animals. We have a lot of that behavior, even if we try something else,” Palmgren points out.
Palmgren has searched for the movement language and world of the work together with the dancers. Inspiration has been sought from the courtship of birds, which they have watched in rehearsals.
“The movements are quite extreme, and there is not much development in them, but they are explosive and shocking,” Palmgren says.
Many birds change their own shape and appearance during courtship. A large pile of different clothes has been used in the rehearsals, which have made it easier to imitate courtship.
The book contains references to human courtship behaviour. “It’s about presenting yourself through movement, opening up to the other person that this is who I am. The coronavirus period has brought an exciting addition to this, as it has not been possible to do it live,” Palmgren says.
She has noticed that the birds that usually appear in the dance world are graceful and elegant, like the birds of Swan Lake or the Dying Swan, even though there are many kinds of birds. The same Swan Lake world can be seen in the one-dimensional Tinder.
Palmgren’s work distances itself from these: “This is also a courtship for diversity and the invitation of difference.”
GLG
Riia Kivimäki and Saku Mäkelä’s GLG was founded in Paris at the choreography centre La Briqueterie. Paris was opening up from restrictions at the same time as a large demonstration of cultural people was taking place in Finland.
“It was liberating to get to Paris, where everything revolves around culture and art. It is supported and appreciated in such a different way than here. My own work felt meaningful,” Mäkelä says.
In Paris, the duo worked on the basis of a let-go theme. Couple acrobatics and circus use a circus grip in which one of them is held above the wrist. One of the starting points was to experiment with what happens when you let go of your grip. “It was great to witness how a whole world began to open up from there,” Mäkelä says.
They also think about what kind of thoughts and familiar operating models should be let go of in order to find something new. “We wanted to create an empty space where new ideas could flow freely,” Kivimäki says.
Kivimäki and Mäkelä did a lot of movement improvisation, wrote and went to see exhibitions. Over the course of two weeks, the framework for the performance was created, and the impact of visual arts, for example, can be seen in its visual appearance.
Later, the let go theme expanded to go let/’s go, because Kivimäki thinks that we have to move forward: “It’s a funny play on words that was born from all the material that was being tossed around. It includes the forward-looking go, let’s go, but also let go.”
GLG can be read like a series of surreal paintings that unfold new stories and realities in layers. They can be seen as indicating, for example, an individual’s connection to themselves and the surrounding world, or the search for and disconnection of a connection.
“We have a strong understanding of the content, but it is up to the viewer to decide how to interpret it,” Mäkelä says.
Kivimäki and Mäkelä have been working together on their own practice since 2018. In addition to dancing, Mäkelä has worked with circus, while Kivimäki has a strong background in gymnastics. The movement language, which combines dance and acrobatics, shows the different physical ways of making art for both.
“The goal has been to create the business language of partnering honestly from the business history that we have, so that we can break existing forms and do something new and different,” Kivimäki says.
Ida Henritius