Angelina Georgieva helps us immerse ourselves in the atmosphere and events of the international Helsinki Dance Festival which took place in 2–12 November 2023.

One of the most interesting events in the world of dance at the end of last year was the international festival Moving in November that took place in Helsinki. Its programme featured bold and outstanding performances by artists who have already gained international recognition, but it also demonstrated a commitment to the local scene by supporting Finnish creative collectives and productions.

Moving in November has been taking place since the 1980s, initially as a platform for presenting Finnish contemporary dance at times when there were almost no stages and institutions to support this. Its international programme gradually developed and the festival turned into something like a window to the world. Since 2019, its artistic director is Kerstin Schroth, who works together with producer Isabel Gonzalez. Kerstin is from Germany and lives in France and has solid experience as a production manager of dance artists and the good knowledge of their perspectives and needs was evident in her programming approach. It demonstrated her aspiration to present original artistic signatures while addressing issues relevant to the world of contemporary dance.

With Save the last dance for me by choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni – a leading figure in the field of contemporary dance in Italy, she defended the idea that even a 20-minute performance can have a place of its own in an evening’s programme and create an experience as intense as a one-hour production would create.

Sciarroni’s choreography is based on the Italian folk dance polka chinata, which became popular in the region of Bologna in the early 20th century as a courtship dance – it was practised on the streets and during social events solely by male couples before getting married and they used it as a means for self-presentation in front of the community. After the 1960s, the dance gradually sank into oblivion and today there are very few people that still remember its steps. For Save the last dance for me, Sciarroni worked with one of the few instructors who managed to reconstruct it based on videos and traces that have remained. However, the choreographer’s objective was not to preserve the polka chinata, but to transform it through the prism of contemporary sensitivity, culture and relationships, which is probably also the most productive way in which contemporary art can interact with the heritage of social and folklore dances and make them relevant to today’s perceptions. Sciarroni developed the original version of polka chinata with a duration of one minute and thirty seconds within the 20-minute choreography, keeping all steps and principles of the dance, while at the same time adding many reiterations and variations in space.

Giovanfrancesco Giannini, a performer in the piece, made a very interesting comment by stating that contemporary dancers have difficulty mastering a dance for couples where you have to constantly touch your partner. From the very beginning, he and Gianmaria Borzillo emerge in the space encircled by the public in a small hall in Kunsthall in Helsinki, holding their hands. Tapes glued to the mosaic floor traced the trajectory of their movements. They both turn to face each other, smile and put their hand on the other person’s shoulder and back and swirl into an almost acrobatic dance, which primarily consists of quick steps, high jumps and turns. The choreography develops with electronic music in the background, which sets the main rhythm and atmosphere, almost making time elastic. It both distances while at the same time almost hypnotically draws the attention to the formal features of the dance and sharpens the perceptions about the interactions between the two performers where they create a joint system of energy exchange and physical support. During the turns, both of them almost squat to the ground and rise again, they twist back and the audience hold their breath from the feeling that they might drop or fall at any time. However, after their carefully performed bold movements, they both stand up, smile to each other, stop for a while and then go on. In this way, the whole dance gets coloured by the emerging relationship between them, it becomes an embodiment of trust and partnership, the lack of which would not make it happen. It is the very manifestation of this that shows the value of this dance today.

Finally, after the bow, the two dancers proceeded to perform the original one-minute version of polka chinata. The blare of playful accordion music immediately changed its concept. All of a sudden it turned into a live, social and inclusive event. Usually, Alessandro Sciarroni’s project consists of both presentation of the performance and conducting workshops where dance is transferred to new generations of men and women beyond the gender stereotypes traditionally characterising social dances and rediscovered its significance today.

Moving in November gradually and delicately started to accommodate itself in the increasingly dark and cold Helsinki in early November, when winter was already starting to set in. With the low grey sky and scarce light due to the early dusk in the background, the festival created a cosy and intimate atmosphere. Soup was served after each performance so that spectators can stay longer together and share their impressions. The next day at noon everyone was invited to conversations with the artists over a soup – the so-called Soup Talks. The entire atmosphere helped the festival develop its poetics, also reiterated by the performances that opened up a different space of togetherness. In this way, they not only presented it, but also made it happen. Like for example the piece Scores that shaped our friendship (Germany/Poland). In 2020, it was awarded the German “Faust” prize for best dance performance and in 2021 it was selected for the most significant theatre festival in the German speaking area Berliner Theatertreffen.

Today, the integrated dance has already a place of its won on Europe’s dance floor. For me, Scores that shaped… was valuable because it eroticised the body with different abilities, presenting it as a body that experiences pleasure, a body that both desires and could be desired despite its usual perception through pain and isolation. The authors and performers of the piece were Lucy Wilke, who was born with muscular atrophy of the spine, and Pawel Dudus, with his very well-trained body of a dancer. They were accompanied on stage by electronic music composer Kim Ramona. To the sounds of her soundtrack, the three of them created a sensual space of intimacy and care that explored a territory of relationships beyond the poles of activity/passivity, victim/predator, etc.

At the start, Lucy, Pawel and Kim were placed on silver mattresses surrounded by white fluffy carpets, which were also laid on the platforms for spectators arranged near them. As a reviewer had wisely written, the performance space arranged in this way, with its soft pink or deep blue lighting, resembled an utopian nest in the clouds, a transitional realm of intimacy and imagination. The artists welcomed the seated audience as if they were their guests, and started telling them about their relationships, unfolding them into seven chapters and seven basic principles that predetermined their score. One of the chapters sounded like a poem by Lucy about the way she feels about her body from the inside, how she becomes one movement with it, which is complemented by Pawel. Another one consisted of an erotic game where Pawel turned into a gracious cougar and Lucy became an antelope about to be attacked. Or he danced to give her pleasure, by moving together with her, while she sat in her wheelchair.

While these scenes demonstrated power, autonomy and freedom, the willingness of the different bodies to learn how to be together with care and love, they were contrasted by Lucy’s stories about her romantic dates via online applications, where the most common phrase is: “You have a very beautiful face, but…”. And this is where all her vulnerability and loneliness were revealed, beautifully expressed from the moment when Pawel slipped a transparent pink stocking over her head and daubed her face with paints in different colours – a powerful image of the disturbed sense of self as someone differing from the others and of the distorting perceptions of others about you.

Scores that shaped our friendship unfolds as a hybrid choreography of micro-movements, of words describing imaginary sceneries and sensory experiences, as well as of role plays in communication that is based on tenderness and mutual recognition. By putting these qualities on focus, it strives to resolve the inevitable situations of perceiving the different one as someone dependent on the others and as a victim, however, their revocation seems rather utopian for now. The performance largely puts the personal relationships between Lucy and Pawel in an aesthetic framework who want to bring their open-mindedness and intimacy to the interaction with the audience by offering a free-flowing score for movement to the spectators as well. From the very beginning, they state that anyone can change their seat at any time, if they want to, and move all over the place, if they do not feel comfortable sitting. Thus, in this “relaxed performance”, as it is named in the programme notes, the spectators leave the framework of a disembodied observer of the intimate sharing between the performers. Spectators are rather involved as participants in a shared situation where everyone’s presence is accounted for.

This can be also said to an even greater extent about MIKE – an unusual three-hour performance of the Canadian artist Dana Michel. The winner of the “Silver Lion” award of the Venice Dance Biennale of 2017 stretched the sense of time, undermined the requirements for productivity of actions and blew up the boundaries of what we can call a performance.

The programme note to the piece says that it deals with our attitude to work, which occupies the greater share of our time and determines our rhythm of life and behaviour. For me, however, MIKE (the title may seem as arbitrary as most of the acts in the performance that are unrelated to each other) was a play with the performer’s work itself at first place. Dana Michel made the spectators anticipate the start of the performance for a long time, seated chaotically on the floor in one of the spaces of Caisa cultural centre, while recordings of piano exercises on the famous “Für Elise” are played. She appeared almost unnoticed in an old-fashioned brown suit with a white shirt, reminding people of a clerk from a mid-century establishment. The first action I remembered her doing was brushing her teeth for a long time, way too long, with a derisive look at people around her, and then putting on her lipstick, half-lying on the floor, almost curled up against the wall, with a little lamp lit up and under the eyesight of the people seated around her. The centre of the space, carefully left vacant from any visitors, waiting for something to happen there, remained unoccupied during the entire length of three hours. All actions happened somewhere else, somewhere different, but not at the centre, often almost in the dark. At some point, the performer walked through the building corridors, constantly turning off the lights lit by the visitors, as if she wanted to disappear. The audience became aggressive in their desire to follow her, to seek the performance, to absorb every gesture made by Dana Michel and she skilfully played with that hunger – she satiated it with actions devoid of any logic at first sight, but it still seemed that she was doing something or creating something – a peculiar sculpture made of cartons, she studied things on the walls, she arranged tools like a wrench or a hammer covered with white socks on the floor, etc.

She always started something only to suddenly stop it and the solemnness she had when she carried out these meaningless actions with actual tools of trade made her particularly comical. She taught the audience to accept the fact that no one would be able to follow what was happening in its entirety, that they should overcome the moments of waiting and those that followed her learned that she was not leading them to any particular place, a culmination event or a hidden secret. At one point those who had decided to follow the performer lost her from their sight and started asking questions: “Where does the performance continue, where is the performance?” And this is when we realised that our behaviour as spectators driven by our insatiable desire to seek, to see, to get involved in something extraordinary is not only part of the performance itself, but also under serious attack. Michel finely demonstrated how we link measurement and categorisation of time with a specific notion of productivity and significance. Her minimalistic actions mimicking routines from everyday life or different spheres of labour, but devoid of any meaning or logic, opened our senses for another perception of time – first, as a devouring void we are desperately trying to fill and then, as a thick space that emerges at times of communication with the other.

At no point did the performer stop her delicate interaction with the people present around her, appearing fragile in her chaos, comical in her concentration, childishly playful and reckless in her actions at the same time. In one of the charming moments of the piece, she “collapsed” heavily and clumsily, but also with all her fragility, next to a woman seated on one of the very few chairs. She looked at her, they started smiling at each other, then she whispered something to her ear and in the end they started unfolding a paper roll. MIKE could have continued forever, however, just as the third hour passed by, it ended with the wrapping of an office chair with wrapping paper. The messy space looked like a scenery of the spontaneous creative drive in a poetics of the dysfunctional where both the comical and tragic dimension of existence creeps in and which is charged with the poetry of fleeting interactions.

In the conversation with the artist that followed the performance, it was discussed that she had some form of autism, which is the reason why she could only concentrate for a short time and why she was hypersensitive to people around her and to situations of high stress. This information helped me appreciate another aspect of the performance – Dana Michel managed to develop an atmosphere and poetics relevant to the way her perceptions functions, with her own rhythm and flow of action.

My personal favourite in this diverse programme where every performance had a place of its own, was Bacchae – Prelude to a Purge by choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas from Cabo Verde and based in Lisbon, who had also been awarded with the “Silver Lion” award of the Venice Dance Biennale.

With this free interpretation of “Bacchae” by Euripides, the festival was launched which had the effect of ultimate saturation and purification of the senses. Freitas left out the plot of the ancient tragedy completely, generously relying on the sources of its performativity in the Dionysian ritual transformed into an ecstatic grotesque carnival procession. The performance was featured by seven dancers, together with five musicians who played the trumpet – an instrument that can be both celebratory and funereal, as the choreographer said. This ambivalence was important for her. On stage, the performers looked like a dance and music choir for dithyrambs, which, however, had come out of some Dadaist cabaret. Various images were re-arranged and transformed, primarily in something like a thyrsus – the symbol of Dionysus, music stands and small black chairs, while a large mirror hung up on the white wall at the back.

Looked from a distance, the stage podium resembled a scrambled musical notation. And indeed, it is the music and, above all, rhythm, that lie at the basis of this piece. They control the body, they are used to express the counteraction between order and disorder, harmony and chaos, the rational and the instinctive. It seems that Marlene Monteiro Freitas takes interest in the powers unleashed when we close our eyes and mouth – like the performer who initially welcomed us from the centre of the stage with something like a thyrsus-music stand in her hand and almost convulsively trembling body sitting on a chair. In “Bacchae” by Euripides, these powers are summoned by Dionysus himself, who was presented here as a grotesque figure of a rock star, recreated by a quite successful decoration of the buttocks of one of the dancers with long hair. The microphone was given to them and they frantically recited something incomprehensible. It seemed that an emergency situation occured marked by the sound of an alarm repeated throughout the performance. Freitas kept the structure of ancient tragedy and transformed multiple references to ancient Greek theatre and iconography into contemporary culture in her choreographic interpretation. One of her achievements here is the extremely peculiar physical behaviour of the performers.

The rhythmic marching was sought as a basis in the movement vocabulary, where the body seemed both controlled with its abrupt and mechanical movements, but also slipping out of control with its sudden convulsions. Bodies and faces keep contorting unnaturally and twitch, they seem possessed, thus radiating both horror and comedy. The moment when the dancers sitting on the black stools almost start to rush forward in some kind of frenzy is extremely powerful. This reminds us of bacchae rushing through the forest in a play (the performers wear silver covers on their heads, which brings some sense of timelessness, as an item of some ritual attire), but may also be perceived as a generalised grotesque and ridiculous image of our hectic existence today, where we are in a constant race with either time or other people (the dancers’ costumes are strangely similar to those of blue-collar workers, all of them are “servants” in the complete dual sense of the word in this context). This is an association that seemed to be reinforced in the next scene, where this drive turned into something like typewriting in an office the music stands transformed into.

Freitas opened up a space of the instinctive and ecstatic nature which she sees as a source of both creative and constructive energy – everything on the stage continuously transforms into multiple images and objects, accompanied by destructive and violent power, where the two extremes are constantly intertwining. A strong moment in this regard was seen toward the end of this more than 2-hour adventure, when one of the performers sprayed herself with bloody red paint and covered the area of her womb with her hands with a horrified expression. This reminds us both of the plot of “Bacchae”, where Agave killed her son Pentheus, who appeared in front of her in the form of a bull, in an outburst of ecstasy, and also of birth as an act of tearing, of opening of the body. Pain, but also overwhelming love, which are both the foundation of life, were presented directly to us after that in a 7-minute Japanese documentary, which deeply and closely followed the birth of a baby out of the body of its mother.

In the course of the entire performance, there was mostly inarticulate speech instead of words, and where words were preserved, they demonstrated lofty love lyric poetry. The stage was overcome by Eros and Thanatos and by Apollo and Dionysus. There is no victim here, no tearing apart, but rather continuous release of energy. And this is how “Bacchae – Prelude to a Purge” recalls what Nietzsche said in “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music”: that the “act of rescue” of art is to banish “repressed state of mind” by “transforming those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live”. In the same way, the performance of Marlene Monteiro Freitas seems to be willing to purge us from the tension and the “repressed thoughts” today’s world of anxiety creates within us with its range between the sublime and the grotesque, with the dominating irrationality on the stage.

Finally, I would like to pay special attention to one of the Finnish production I managed to see – Venus by Janina Rajakangas. The project started as a conversation between her and her daughter, who was on the verge of adolescence and in the process of realising her femininity, but mostly through the aggressive models set by social media and societal stereotypes of beauty and of the objects of desire. In an interview, the choreographer shared how her daughter’s behaviour in online space and reality began to change and be modelled by the eroticising “male perspective”. Janina involved three more girls in the realisation of the piece and they created the materials for it based on mutual conversations.

The audience found itself in a cosy hall in Mad House Theatre, which was arranged like a living room in a home. Sitting next to its walls, we found ourselves involved in something like a ritual performed by the four young participants, who chanted incantations reiterating some common references to girls (“honest, humble, quiet, tender, but also stupid, problematic and noisy”), songs and dances on the verge between hysteria, ecstasy and seduction. Hints of sexual abuse also crept in their words. Finally, they took us outside so that we can witness a procession of burning of a costumed effigy – a generalised image of the aggressor. The performance was extremely exciting and touching with the energy of the girls searching for their own truth and freedom to be themselves. However, it is also disturbing with the extreme demonisation of the male figure and its perception as necessarily a predator and abuser.

Moving in November presented some more artists and artistic projects between theatre and visual arts and between dance and social work, part of which were produced by the festival itself. My meetings and conversations with local artists and spectators of the different social formats of the event were both valuable and interesting. They helped me learn more about the strategy of the current festival team with respect to the cultural atmosphere in the city.

I learned that it presents artistic practices and production that are rather different and new to the local context, thereby managing to exercise strong influence on discussions therein. Moving in November also took advantage of the extensive, very well-equipped and living cultural infrastructure in Helsinki, deliberately choosing to present its programme at different smaller stages and cultural centres rather than the established dance centres, such as Zodiac and Dance House, so that it can reach more diverse audiences. The festival took place at five different locations in the city, which were selected based on the variety of formats of the productions only part of which were for a conventional stage.

I left Moving in November charged by both the interesting creative ideas and the vision of the organisers about the type of festival the experimental dance needs.

The visit of the festival took place within the Capacity Grid programme, as an exchange between partners Brain Store Project, Sofia, and the Moving in November Festival, Helsinki, part of the European project Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found (LLB3), funded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, in partnership with HIAP Helsinki