Tanssista kirjoittaminen on nyt kuuma aihe monella foorumilla. Myös Pohjoismaat ja Baltian maat yhdistävä tanssin toimijoiden Kedja -tapaaminen nosti sen vahvasti esiin.
Suomessa Teatterikorkeakouluun puuhataan taidekirjoittamisen maisteriohjelmaa, ja Suomen Kulttuurirahasto käynnistää ensi vuonna kulttuuritoimittajille suunnatun täydennyskoulutuksen. Selvästi on herätty siihen, ettei taidepuhe ole yhdentekevää, ja hyvistä kirjoittajista on pulaa.
Tallinnassa syyskuussa järjestetyssä Kedjassa käsiteltiin tanssikritiikkiä kahdessa workshopissa. Virolaisen kriitikon Ott Karulinin Cooperative Criticism -workshopissa pyrittiin löytämään vaihtoehtoja perinteiselle lehtikritiikin muodolle, ja norjalaisen tanssintutkijan ja kriitikon Sidsel Papen Re/viewing Dance -työpajassa opeteltiin hajottamaan tanssiteos osiin ja tiedostamaan oma katsomisen tapa.
Ott Karulin haastoi pohtimaan, voisiko kritiikkikin olla keskustelevaa:Voisiko siitä kenties syntyä rakentava palautteen muoto, jonka äärellä kriitikko ja taiteilija voisivat tavata myös kasvokkain?
Miksi kriitikot piiloutuvat usein sanomalehden paperisen sivun taakse, sen sijaan että uskaltautuisivat panelisteiksi esitysten jälkeisiin yleisökeskusteluihin tai jopa seuraamaan koko taiteellista prosessia? Toisaalta voidaan pohtia myös sitä, ovatko taiteilijat valmiita astumaan alas norsunluutorneistaan ja ylipäätään vastaanottamaan tämäntyyppistä palautetta. Toki keskustelun kuuluisi siten olla molemminpuolista – myös taiteilijalla olisi silloin mahdollisuus korjata kriitikon käsityksiä ja tarkemmin perustella näkemyksiään.
Ott Karulinin workshop muistutti siitä, miten vähäistä suomalainen taidekeskustelu oikeastaan onkaan, ja miten paljon sitä voitaisiin vielä kehittää. Meillä ei ole myöskään minkäänlaisia malleja siitä, miten taiteilijoita voitaisiin tukea ammatissaan tarjoamalla esimerkiksi rakentavaa palautetta tai muuta keskusteluapua taiteellisissa haasteissa. Apurahan saanut taiteilija saa oikeastaan ainoan ”virallisen” palautteen (lyhyen lehtikritiikin lisäksi) vasta seuraavassa apurahahaussa: kielteisenä tai myönteisenä päätöksenä.
Sidsel Pape peräänkuulutti omassa workshopissaan tanssin katsojan taitoa erottaa teos ja omat katsojan ”silmälasit” toisistaan
Kaikilla katsojilla on ikään kuin oma filtterinsä, viitekehyksensä, joka saattaa joskus tuoda katsottuihin teoksiin asioita, joita niissä ei edes ollut. Papen workshopissa pyrittiinkin tulemaan tietoisiksi siitä, mitä juuri minä katson tanssissa, ja toisaalta laajentamaan horisonttia seikkoihin, jotka usein jäävät itseltä huomaamatta.
Tämä oli Papen vastaus myös kriitikon etiikan ja vastuun kysymyksiin: On pyrittävä tiedostamaan, ettei arvota teosta sellaisena kuin sen minun mielestäni olisi pitänyt olla, vaan sellaisena kuin se on tässä ja nyt, kokonaisena ja itsenään. Toisaalta myös oma positio katsojana ja kirjoittajana on osattava – ja uskallettava – tuoda esiin. Vastuunsa tunteva kirjoittaja ei piiloudu kaikkitietävän ja kaikkivoipaisen taidejumalan utuiseen hahmoon.
Myös Sidsel Pape kannusti etsimään kirjoittamisen muotoja, jotka vastaavat teoksen tunnelmaa tai rakennetta, tai muuten vain haastavat tavallisen lehtikritiikin konventioita.
Näistä samoista teemoista myös Liikekieli.com haluaa herättää keskustelua ensi vuonna järjestettävässä seminaarisarjassa, joka tulee olemaan osa suurempaa kansainvälistä Kedja -projektia nimeltä Writing Movement.
Veera Lamberg
Kirjoittaja on tanssija ja Liikekieli.comin päätoimittaja.
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Liikekieli.com julkaisee osan Sidsel Papen workshopin antia:
Re/viewing Sarah Kane by Mārtiņš Eihe
Re/viewer: Maria Prokhorova
…Mārtiņš Eihe Sarah Kane Latvia 19.09 / 18.30 Kanuti Gildi SAAL Ticket… says the performance program which I open to check the right spelling of all the names for my try-out review. I realize this has been the first time I’m reading this text. The schedule of program keðjaTallinn 2012: Encounter of Baltic and Nordic dance artists happened to be too overwhelming and too tight.
What could be easier than watching performance with absolutely open perception…what could be harder than that…
…The performance is inspired by the works and life of the infamous young English playwright, Sarah Kane… text continues. Shame on me, I don’t know this infamous playwright and I don’t feel inspired after performance to learn more about her…Should I be?
The whole action on the stage was making an image of family violence in my mind free from given background of the performance. Family through the picture of common living-room with pink vintage sofa and big carpet – the only props on the stage along with electric guitar and its technical equipment. Violence through performers’ arguing in the very beginning how they would like to kill their friends. The audience hear the most refined and cruelest details in mixed English, Russian and Latvian. Again violence through performers’ aggressive motion in the space and harsh physical contact with each other while performance evolves. They curve awkwardly, they buck, they disturb, they drag each other’s bodies. Female dancer assaults male musician. Male actor pulls female dancer by her hair. They force each other to dance and hardly defend themselves. …The performance does not try to tell the story of the playwright who suffered from depression and died at the age of 28…text continues. And again I see violence through agonizing and loud sound of the bass guitar accompanying most of the action. …Instead, the director Mārtiņš Eihe has taken the spirit of anger, depression and brutality that surrounded Sarah Kane and let his performers (Kristīne Borodina, Aigars Apinis and Edgars Rubenis) – a dancer, an actor and a musician – play freely around with it…text continues. Still violence in non-action in the performance ending when all the three leave the stage but that sound stay. The audience sees the empty space in the beginning of the performance as well as in its ending. Performers bring the spirit of violence into the empty space, they leave (the) emptiness behind.
Nowadays contemporary dance performances challenge you to see rather choreography than dance. …Sarah Kane is a physical theatre performance which talks the language of dance, theatre and live music…text continues. They call it as a physical theatre. What was the language of dance? Can language of dance be interesting and curious without choreography’s tools to communicate ideas through the movement, to create images, to create connections? There were bodies moving freely in the space. There was meaningful non-verbal contact. There was utterly strong presence of the performers on the stage. There was convincing drama and real theatre. There was lack of knowledge in choreography. There was no choreographer playing around.
Sarah Kane was performed at Baltic Bubble festival within program keðjaTallinn 2012: Encounter of Baltic and Nordic dance artists. Re/viewing Sarah Kane was my final assignment of 3-day workshop Re/viewing Dance with Sidsel Pape (NOR). This review has been influenced with the discussion on the performance with other workshop participants.
Being a dance-artist I assigned for the workshop in order to fulfill my lack of knowledge in dance criticism, to learn the tools it uses to speak about dance from re/viewer’s perspective. I’ve got the most essential advice there: Play with your review!
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Agne Biliunaite
A RAINY DAY IN PARADISE
Author and director: Martins Eihe; authors and performers: Kristine Borodina, Edgars Rubenis, Aigars Apinis/Martins Eihe; producer: „Nomadi“; premier: January 14th, 2011.
Rainy evening of 19th of September in Tallinn where the first meeting of „kedja 2012-2015” (contemporary dance encounters) takes part. Suspicion about dark season is already sneaking around. NATO autumn trainings rumour in the empty sky. Bad day to live it on. Better just lean on art which is here in order to save our souls.
Have in mind this inner weather of the lithuanian dance critic wading back and forth in the medieval town inhabited with finno-ugrics which she doesn‘t understand nor from first neither from the last word. Somehow she finds her way to the Kanuti Gildi saal where there is Martins Eihe, young director from Latvia, presenting a performance named „Sarah Kane“ after the realy lived and yound dead playwriter Sarah Kane (1971-1999). It is obvious that „Sarah Kane“ will also deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture – both physical and psychological – and death as the real one did. Guess there will be some poetry, lots of extreme and violent stage actiones and words.
First there was the Director
Brightly lighted stage (clear as if it is daytime). Pinky vintage sofa marks the center of the space. There is also a big carpet (makes the space more home spirit), electic guitar (each home is always a stage) and lots of cabels (reminds about power connections which we already got used to). The first man comes and sits on the sofa (later on he turnes to be a musician). Then another man (turns to be actor). And finaly the women (dancer). The performance starts.
Then there came Devil, Adam and Eve
First man starts provoking women visualising piqantly in words how he would like to kill his friend. Women responds to his temptation and continues this macabric story-telling adding to it tendernes and eroticism turning to the second man. He is finaly hooked on the bite and continues to reproduce the idea in different possible ways. Later on the first man takes the guitar and leads the hole dynamics of the performance, moves the body of the women, atracts her to stick to it physicly, writhle around himself, around the guitar periodicly slaping here down to the floor. While the second man tries to change the recorded guitar rythm and melody with his amateur attempts but it sounds rather weak. The cycle of temptation, continuos act of seducement by the untachible but easily physicly sensible low vibrations (low frequencies of the electric instrument reinforced by speakers and repeatedly recorded) continues even after the musician leaves the stage. This hardly bearable sound echos not only in those two chosen particular Man and Women, but also in each and every spectator sitting quietly in the amfitheatric audience hall.
The End/The Begining
The performance could be seen almost as a chrestomatic Greek drama just the final is much more postmodernistic – it is not the God who comes at the end to bring back the world into the right order, it is a third man from the audience who goes on the stage, turns of the madly deeply brutal sound and stops the cycle, i.e. finishes the performance. Despite it‘s strongly physical and in many ways just brutal text (words, movements, sound) the context of this latvian performance (performed in Baltic Babilon language: latvian- english-russian) is purely Christian. There are many colorful exterior wall paintings preserved on the Romanian churches from the XVth century depicting seduced sinner man and women (for the poor citizens who watch them while hiding in the monastries from the outside enemies). This performance today in a way is the same colorful and exaggerated picture of XXth century talking about that same never ending seduction sneaking aroud human nature. The only thing that changed is the Artist‘s style which sophysticated over the time, but not the main caracters or plot. Even the conclusion still is the same –man‘s divine feature – the will to choose.
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Veera Lamberg:
review of sarah kane
three people sitting on the sofa. as in the living room. chatting.
nothing moves. violence. nothing moves. violence violence violence violence.
performers are honestly present. sex. pink skirt. noise noise noise noise noise. they called it music, i guess.
nothing happens. nothing happens. time passes by. violence. angst.
three people changing positions on the sofa: highlight. then angst again.
time does’t move. fight. making sounds live on stage. noise. angst. violence violence.
is this the representation of the unhappy live, depression?
violating the spectator so that he wants to leave. shout. punch somebody. die?
is this the feeling inside of sarah kane’s head?
back bent. guitar. speech. one laugh. black heavy shoes. heaviness heaviness.
postmodern as this poem. exists. no explanations. angst. angst angst. violence violence. irrationalism.
could I kindly ask you who is sarah kane
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Telly tubby opera
By Sidsel Pape
What kind of a world gives this spectator called “I” such an unpleasant sensation, such unease and discomfort? “Wasted Land” does.
”Help, help!”, cryes a recorded sound from really loud loudspeakers. In the performance called ”Wasted Land” excessive rhythms from Africa meet uniform costumes from Asia, meet opera maniac libretto from Europe. Not even the Estonians in the public understand the latter. No wonder: The four fairly young men on stage, all moving, talking and dressing in unison, are from Lithuania.
With Telly tubby greyish pants pulled up over shoulders, with turbans of same colour, four men move through harsh city-scapes. Their moves are angular, aggressive attacking the air, not always visible for the big black boxes that hide the floor. Videos are projected onto these structures: Deserted suburbs with a bombed outhouse in a dirty field. A highway is rolling endlessly. Anyone standing in front of the image gets driven over, is sacrificed.
The films loop along with the repetitive sound scapes. “Help, help!” Is there a saviour somewhere? The men enter a holy space by singing and walking in sacred formations. Some type of worship is suddenly happening, some soothing ritual. And just when one thinks peace has entered “Wasted Land”, the savage hunt down each other´s throats and they start barking like mad dogs in a yard. Next thing I know is that they jump around like innocent rabbits.
One out of few feminine features are the shaved muscular armpits on the youngest performers. The oldest has a huge beard as well as plenty of bodily hair. Right before “Wasted Land” has come to a longed for end, all four stand in a stereotypical pose with lifted hands, spread fingers and flirting eyes. The tableau works as a short image of all the missing women in the ongoing ”Arabian spring”.
Composer, author of libretto and soloist: Jonas Sakalauskas; Choreography: Agnija Šeiko; Performers: Petras Lisauskas, Darius Berulis, Mantas Černeckas, Jonas Sakalauskas; Stage design: Sigita Šimkūnaitė, Arūnas Paslaitis Costumes: Sandra Straukaitė; Dramaturgy: Goda Dapšytė; Video: Rimas Sakalauskas; Producer: Radvilė Nakaitė; Manager: Goda Giedraitytė; Partners: PI „Garsai ir blyksniai“, Operomania, Lithuanian Dance Information Centre
Duration: 40 min.
Premiere: June 4th, 2012 in Art Printing House Vilnius in the program of international contemporary dance festival “New Baltic Dance 2011”
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