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An ENERGETIChalt. The silence and fury of Katri Soini s dance by minna tawast

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The silence and fury

of Katri Soini’s dance

by minna tawast

ENERGETIC An halt

In 1994 Katri Soini was named Young Artist of the Year by Finland Festivals, the umbrella organisation which covers all Finnish festivals. The fact that she was the first dancer to ever receive the honour sums up the status of dance art in Finland, although it also says much about Soini’s skills, her contribution to contemporary dance, and what she represented at that time.



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Photo Sakari Viika

The girl who always was, choreography Katri Soini

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Photo Sakari Viika

The Whip, choreography Reijo Kela

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“Her sweet appearance is a disguise.

Tonight Katri Soini will again put on her heavy army surplus boots and jeans and get up onto the stage. Soon she will grab a strong man’s waist and lift him up in the air with her powerful 50-kilo body, and then the next moment she will throw him down on the ground. And now she is absorbed in a touching duet. No, Katri Soini is not the archetypal female dancer”, wrote the journalist Kati Juurus, introducing the Young Artist of the Year to readers of the country’s biggest daily newspaper’s monthly supplement.

In Finland in the 1990s it was still possible for a reporter to think that a female dancer equalled a ballerina. And she was not totally wrong.

Soini, however, was the star of a small but growing dance circle, and the epitome of the idea of femininity in Kenneth Kvarnström’s hard-hitting dance works, which excited a lot of interest in the Nordic countries. Soini rocked, and that was quite a novelty in Finnish contemporary dance.

The importance of the essential

Ten years later Katri Soini is undoubtedly a Finnish star, and she has danced in works by many important choreographers. She is a dancer whose artistic expression, technique, energy and humour have been honed to a degree that enables her to step straight into the hearts of the audience. Movement takes her through transformations and halts, towards her deepest self.

- Being a dancer is connected to who you are, says Soini as we talk about her journey from first year dance student at the Theatre Academy’s Department of Dance to dancer, teacher and, in her own words, choreography enthusiast.

- When I teach I focus on the essence of existence and I search for movement qualities, so that each student can find their own particular kind. I want to cleanse movement of all elaboration and reveal its

essence. My aim is to teach my students to recognise the most important elements of each movement – its shape, direction and form. The point is that movement should not only look the way it is supposed to look - the dancer should also experience it as such.

This is the core of Soini’s own dancing and presence: when you look at her you know that you are in the presence of something essential, that the dancer herself knows exactly why she is on the stage – even when the dance work as a whole might be more difficult to understand.

Her thought and alertness show. Soini’s dynamic quality charges even those quieter moments: the viewer knows that her halt is not static and waits in suspense for the next thing to happen.

- I happen to be quick by nature, and my energy levels are high. I can’t help it, I just have to work on it and fight against it. I learn fast and I throw myself into other people’s arms or emotions without hesitation. To listen and be slow and prudent are characteristics that do not come easily to me. For example, in an improvisation I would immediately start running - I have to really concentrate in order to first stop and just be there and observe things, she says, looking the interviewer straight in the eye to check that she has been understood, and then bursting into laughter.

Soini’s laugh is not easy to describe; she talks fast and thinks fast and, it follows, goes quiet fast and laughs fast, without warning. Her laughter is like an exclamation mark: ha!, that’s the way it is.

Kvarnström and Raatikainen

Soini started collaborating with Kvarnström at the time he broke through choreographically with Exhibo (second production 1990) Voyeur (1992), liquid (1993), XXX (1995), and 108 db (1998). At that time Kvarnström – who has been the Theatre Academy’s professor of choreography and the director of the Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company – presented a world that was anxious, aggressive and ironic, so that it triggered reactions from both his Finnish and Swedish audiences. The critics initially failed to detect his humour and took his expressiveness for populism, whereas his defenders talked about the new generation and music videos. His rough female characters were roughly treated, raising suspicions of misogyny. Soini wrote about Kvarnström’s works in a book called Watch your step (Fält & Hässler, Sweden 2001):

- I happen to be quick by nature, and my energy levels are high. I can’t help it, I just have to work on it and fight against it. I learn fast and I throw myself into other people’s arms or emotions without hesitation.

Chor. Arja Raatikainen | Photo Sakari Viika Photo Sakari Viika

Comments The girl who always was



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“Seeing Exhibo in Helsinki opened a whole new world for me. It contained an energy, the movements themselves both spoke and painted all the colours of human life on stage - from togetherness to loneliness, from hope to fear, from willpower and trying again - to giving up. The work seemed to have a big heart, which constantly pumped life in its veins. I admired the dancers. I wanted to feel the movements in my own body. I felt a connection with the content. Now I had a dream - to one day be part of Kenneth’s work. Today - no longer dancing with him - I miss experiencing Kenneth’s energy: total physicality, power, being able to fly, dive, the rhythm, the exhaustion, the sensitivity and the stillness (. ..)”

- Now I realise that I do still get a lot of these things in different forms, Soini points out.

Another choreographer who has meant a lot to Soini is Arja Raatikainen, who has for several years now been applauded as an internationally interesting choreographer by e.g. Ballet-tanz magazine.

Raatikainen’s works combine multilayered images of abstract worlds

with mundane and concrete scenes as she examines humanity as a part of the world and humans as social and biological animals. Raatikainen and Soini studied together, and their collaboration is so intense that their friendship and working relationship is like that of a long-married couple; every now and again they need to get a bit of distance from each other.

Since 1990 Soini has danced in e.g. the following works by Raatikainen: One Way Only (1994), Give Me Happiness (1996), Comments (1998), Opal-D (2000) and Labile Mobile (2002).

It is easy to imagine that, after Kvarnström the dynamo, Raatikainen set Soini new kinds of challenges, like how to move from an explosive use of power to a slower, more internalised strength of movement - from vertical to horizontal movement which actively takes space. Both Kvarnström and Raatikainen are visualists and perfectionists, but where Kvarnström relies on atmosphere, spontaneity and what can be seen, Raatikainen focuses on the essence of things and is extremely meticulous about every detail.

- Kenneth’s works are not as intense experiences for the dancer as Arja’s; Kenneth dispenses less information during the working process whereas Arja talks to everybody non-stop. From the very first movement onwards there is a constant process of working out how to bodily experience and express a certain idea. From a dancer’s point of view, Kenneth’s scenes are more independent of each other, and his perspective is like an architect’s. The dancer is left with the responsibility and freedom to create a lively inner world. Arja makes the movement

her own by working on its rhythm, energy, direction and form; the movement is endlessly refined and its analysis leads to a deep, fulfilled and meaningful command of it. Both of them, however, have occasionally lost me with regards to the end result and the significance of all the bits and pieces.

The girl who always was

Soini has made choreographies since 1987, albeit rarely. In 2002 she made a duet for herself and DJ Bunuel, The girl who always was, which found its audience in a small fringe theatre and was positively reviewed by the critics, who enjoyed its freshness, humour and the way it got its message across. Once again Soini rocked, because she was courageous enough to perform with a DJ, and because the music included both live rock and sampled music.

The girl who always was was basically about relation- ships and a girl’s growth into womanhood.

But there was more to it as well, with different dialogues going on between a girl and a woman, a man and a woman, music and dance, and a performer and a non-performer. The most fascinating dialogue was between the professional performer and the non-performer: even though DJ Bunuel was used to being in front of an audience behind his mixing desk, he would not consciously use his presence and body, whereas Soini, as a dancer, is a performer from head to toe. Having said that, Soini did not try to deal with these issues in her work.

- I found it puzzling that Bunuel did not know certain basics such as the custom of repeating some elements during the course of a piece.

And when we tried to go through the dramaturgical curve of the work I realised that that was not the way he thought at all. And then there were the times when he forgot things during a performance... There was a certain friction in the air when I simply could not grasp how he could forget something. On the other hand, these differences between us reminded me what I was looking for in the first place: uncertainty and random coincidence in a work that is ready to perform.

The involvement of live rock-’n’-roll meant that the performance did not seem thoroughly refined, but was rather a kind of dance and music concert based on both performers’ strong and energetic presence.

- We started our collaboration in such a way that I visited his home, where he had one room full of records. We certainly didn’t begin by trying to find a theme or a topic! We simply sat there and enjoyed the music - and I naturally wanted to know what we would choose and how

The Whip

Opal-D | Chor. Arja Raatikainen | Photo Sakari Viika

Opal-D XXX | Chor. Kenneth Kvarnström | Photo Tomas Gedin

XXX

Red-letter Days | Chor. Jenni Kivelä | Photo Marko Mäkinen



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the piece would begin and so on. Uncertainty is so hard. An academically educated dancer should surely know what she is doing: “What is your message? How could it be improved?” I think that being aware of what one is doing is very important to a dancer, but at times it can also create locks and be like a ball and chain. It can take away the joy of being in the here-and-now.

Soini sees herself first and foremost as a dancer. She says that she even thinks like a dancer in her choreographies, and adds that she has known from the start that she is not like the auteur-choreographers Raatikainen and Kvarnström.

- I can work with them because I’m good at adjusting, and a dancer always tries to somehow dive into the choreographer’s universe and understand their language. Naturally there are also situations in which you just cannot process any more information or demands - that’s when you have to take a break and digest things in peace. For some dancers the never-ending demand to do it better is not a fascinating challenge but creates locks.

Soini says that making The girl who always was led her into an interest- ing but scary new place, and it changed her relationship to choreog- raphy:

- I do not want to return to the situation where I give the dancers completed material; I would like to look for new ways of doing things together, as a group, although I don’t really know how. I would like the working process and the performance to include those human and momentarily spontaneous elements.

The gym and

physical strength

Soini started to study dance in 1983, at which time the Theatre Academy’s Department of Dance had just been founded and was led by Soili Hämäläinen. The Finnish theatre guru Jouko Turkka was the academy rector, whose idea of theatre is very physical - he was well known for his rough teaching methods and his extremely direct expression. He welcomed the new dance students to the school by telling them that they were not welcome at all.

- Turkka had the habit of saying whatever he liked to whoever he liked. He once told me that if he was built the way I was, he would go to the gym. So I did. His comments had a strong impact on me, even though I wasn’t even his student.

In the gym Soini found a physical strength which she still carries with her, even though she doesn’t really lift weights any more. She

points out that it is impossible to be economic about using muscles if they are weak. Getting strong and surpassing her limits became her obsession and training method for a long time, until her knees could not take it any longer. Soini has since focused on listening to herself more intensely. She talks about bodily awareness and experience, adding that she no longer views her body as just a separate tool.

Soini has good memories of Turkka’s period. She explains that the theatre students’ visibly strong motivation fascinated her.

- I was 17 and everything was still a bit of a mess at the Department of Dance – and in my own life. After the first year I applied to the Department of Acting, but Turkka said that I would make a great musical star, and that I’d be better sticking to dance.

She did as Turkka advised her, and says now that that was definitely the right decision. Many choreographers have made use of her obvious flair for acting and singing, including the young talent Jenni Kivelä, whose choreography Red-letter Days (2003) was the latest to require Soini’s versatile performing skills. She plays a party hostess in this piece,

which deals with the pleasant and difficult aspects of family gatherings in a humorous and bittersweet manner.

- Very refreshing indeed! I was really exhausted after my previous work and I thought about taking a break from dancing. Then I saw Jenni Kivelä’s previous work Flowers – Flower Arrangement and started to cry, although I still cannot explain why. I said to her that I’d love to work with her in the future.

Soini explains that the working process with Kivelä was sort of quiet and pleasantly mundane. There was no high drama involved. Perhaps the work also contains something of Soini’s versatile but unique dancing style, which is clear and functional with no unnecessary or artificial elements.

Uncertainty is so hard. An academically educated dancer should surely know what she is doing: “What is your message? How could it be improved?” I think that being aware of what one is doing is very important to a dancer, but at times it can also create locks and be like a ball and chain. It can take away the joy of being in the here-and- now.

D

Red-letter Days Little Stars Sahara Labile Mobile

Little Stars | Chor. Dorte Olesen | Photo Ninna Lindström Sahara | Chor. Alpo Aaltokoski, | Photo Ninna Lindström Labile Mobile | Chor. Arja Raatikainen | Photo Ninna Lindström



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