Review: Gravity

The jumps and lifts of Gravity’s dancers defied gravity – Jarkko Mandelin’s choreography had hectic power – an enigmatic grey lump floated on the ceiling of the stage

The dance piece Gravity , created in collaboration between Helsinki Dance Company and Kinetic Orchestra, was an experience that made you wonder and sigh. The dancers’ trained, strong muscles and the coordination skills provided by the training, which often began as children, seemed to counteract gravity.

The choreography of Jarkko Mandelin , the artistic director of Kinetic Orchestra, was a combination of bubbling energy and sensitivity that touches the skin. Beneath the surface, there were forces that made the dancers literally fly as if gravity had been overturned for a moment. The performance was hectic, but its movement language still felt relaxed and very inventive.

Mandelin is a choreographer who knows how to express her artistic goals and goals also verbally in a way that even such a person who is almost unfamiliar with dance can understand. According to him, Gravity is a work that also aims to depict what is moving in time right now.

“I want Gravity to not only borrow, but also learn something from their time. Aggressive speed manipulation, stills, a jerky movement that gets stuck, dehumanizing the dancers, and collisions that abruptly stop acceleration were selected as qualitative tools from which we set out to create the spirit of Gravity on top of the rough and big movements mentioned above,” Mandelin writes in the show’s script.

At least in that Gravity was very much in tune with the times, that there were no male or female roles in the performance, but there was equality of performance. By its very existence, the performance challenged the artificial division into which we have grown and to which we have been raised.

Mandelin began her own dance career in her early teens in ballet classes. At the same time, he started dancing breackdance. In her previous work, she has been influenced by circus and oriental martial arts as a choreographer. Gravity was a veritable cornucopia in this regard.

In an interview published on the website of Dance Info Finland, Mandelin says that her career in the performing arts began as a child in amateur theatre.

Gavity had at least part of the structure of a play. The first and last scenes tied the story, or rather, the threads of many stories together.

A sloping platform had been built on the perimeter of the stage, along which the dancers in the first scene flowed down one by one. In the final scene, a stream of running dancers created a cascade of human bodies at the ramp.

Mandelin has also worked as a dance teacher since he was a teenager and he has also done performances with his own son. In my opinion, the opening and closing scenes of Gravity also showed particularly clearly the methods with which Mandelin and his ensemble have created this dance piece.

The methods are not fundamentally different from those that Mandelin says he uses in teaching dance. There are no rigid rules and there is no need to emphasize the importance of technique for professional dancers. The aesthetics of the performance are honed in a creative process through the collaboration of the choreographer and the dancers through experimentation.

The communal nature of the performance was also well reflected in the fact that none of Gravity’s eight dancers stood out as individuals. All eight were incredibly good together and separately. Great!

William Iles, who designed the set and lighting for the performance, had a scenography that fed the imagination. I really had to ask, what was the huge, cigar-shaped, concrete-grey lump floating above the stage?

Flying concrete blocks are even rarer than flying cows in a world ruled by gravity. According to Iles, the lump hung over the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre represented just such a very unlikely object. The end of the boulder had been broken. The fallen head protruded upright on the stage and gave a massive scale to the dancers’ jumps and lifts that had risen to dizzying heights.

Our imagination overturns the shackles imposed by gravity. But of course, the same is done by the forces of nature. The Earth and us, of course, have been rolling at a dizzying speed along the edge of the “hole” pushed into space by the mass of the Sun for more than four billion years without falling to the bottom of the hole once (the first and the last).

However, gravity not only binds, but also releases. To me, the concrete lump of Iles immediately reminded me of the mysterious ‘Oumuamuan, which flew from interstellar space into the solar system, and whose sun’s gravity hurled quickly back into space on this interstellar wanderer’s eternal journey.

Gravity is a really great name for the dance piece.